It’s about the international film industry’s mistaken sense of privilege – that if you have enough talent, you should be above the law. Here at Fem2.0, it’s specifically about the actresses – thoughtful, intelligent, strong, role models for other women – who can so easily overlook the fact that a real 13-year-old girl was plied with alcohol and raped.
Debra Winger and Whoopi Goldberg made public statements excusing Polanski:
Debra Winger: “We hope today this latest (arrest) order will be dropped. It is based on a three-decades-old case that is dead but for minor technicalities. We stand by him and await his release and his next masterpiece.”
Whoopi Goldberg: "I know it wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape. He went to jail and and when they let him out he was like, ‘You know what, this guy’s going to give me a hundred years in jail. I’m not staying.’ So that’s why he left."
Others attached their names to the Free Polanski petition now circulating among what seems to be the celebrity jet set:
Free Polanski petition signatories:
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Isabelle Adjani
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Monica Bellucci
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Isabelle Huppert
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Diane von Furstenberg
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Tilda Swinton
Are these women so star-struck by Polanski’s artistic genius that they momentarily lost their sense of right and wrong and the fact that they were once vulnerable young girls too? Perhaps they personally know the director, and were so shocked by his dramatic arrest that the sense of solidarity among friends overrode any other instinct.
These women will find it hard to regain the stature and respect they enjoyed in the women’s community after such a completely counter-intuitive public stance. One possible silver lining could be if, after all the drama dies down, they stepped forward to lend their names to advocacy organizations working to stop violence against women.
Gloria–recently on Twitter I said that I thought all the effort and money spent on Polanski could be better spent by stopping trafficking. Stop trafficking first! I also suggested that, better than putting him in jail to rot, his assets should be seized and used to help women, and he should be forced to tour the country lecturing about why he committed the rape and why he thought his life was more important than the girl’s life he violated. Hey, make me his booking agent and we’ll get some really feminist film outta Roman…
Many people feel getting Polanski “sends a signal” to pedophiles, but I don’t buy this argument. From what I’ve read about repeat pedophiles, they can’t control their behavior and don’t understand what’s wrong with the power imbalance. In other words, I place pedophiles among the seriously mentally disturbed and sending them a signal is not going to make girls or boys safe.
I don’t know what, exactly, we should do about pedophilia, but from where I sit, the big grab of Polanski deepens my assessment that “tough on crime” is an antique relic for the civic dustbin. I’m going on record saying that what we’re doing is BROKEN. Otherwise, we’ll just keep limping along using our broken methods. The whole damn system is broken at its core. Our assumptions are incorrect. The lunatics are in control of the asylum, too.
Madama, when I heard the news of his arrest, my first thought was that someone was trying to make his or her career by reviving this old scandal, and then put it out of my mind because what’s Roman Polanski to me? But this has become an extremely disappointing exercise of artistic arrogance. Some of our most respected intellectuals have jumped on the bandwagon to support Polanski. Well, if it really were about Polanski, they could have quietly pulled strings and tried to help him get through this as quickly and painlessly as possible. Instead, we have this highly public “How dare you arrest a genius?!” and completely discounting the fact that the man committed a crime against a young girl and never suffered the consequences. These Polanski supporters are people who supposed to stand for compassion, integrity, democracy and all the finest things in us. But with this ridiculous public stance, they show that their standards are relative, so have tragically reduced their right to be standard bearers.
I have been reading a lot about definitions of privilege in my graduate program. Thinking about privilege in relation to the film industry particularly carried my thoughts when I wrote a post on Polanski last week with two of my colleagues:
http://blog-aauw.org/2009/10/07/a-crime-by-any-other-name-is-still-a-crime/
One of the comments particularly stuck out in my mind regarding the emotional attachment that many individuals associate with celebrities. This attachment allows people to essentially “gloss over” criminal behavior. What is in store for our society when people no longer believe in accountability and justice?
Thanks, Keep up the Good work
Roman Polanski has comitted a crime and he should be punished in one way or another. You cannot just forgive someone who abused an underage girl.