11 responses so far ↓

• 1 Soap // Sep 28, 2009 at 5:53 pm

  I don’t get them either.

• 2 Diana // Sep 28, 2009 at 9:24 pm

  It disturbs me how many people in forums I’m on argue that “he didn’t know she was 13″ blah blah blah when her initial testimony stated that 1)he did something she had explicitly told him was not OK (that’s still rape) and 2)SHE WAS AFRAID OF HIM. The fear hasn’t gone away, and as for the judge – is this guy even still have a seat?

• 3 Helen Mosher // Sep 28, 2009 at 11:24 pm

  I feel that way about a certain sexual assault I experienced, and it’s specifically the reason why I left livejournal–the perpetrator of it is a much loved LJ personality, and I couldn’t live with that bludgeon crossing my news feed every fucking day.

  I can only imagine what it’s like for her, but poo on a justice system that is so consumed with dispensing said so-called justice that it can’t even recognize that the victim has said that in her eyes Polanski _has_ served time, just not in the way we think of serving time. And more importantly, she feels like a victim twice over because of the way this is being pursued. [link, from January]

  So I, frankly, don’t give a rats ass about Polanski or his apologists. I hear the victim saying she had reached her own closure on it years ago and doesn’t want her wounds reopened and put back on display; she doesn’t want to get dragged into the media circus every single time something happens with him, but it keeps happening. How is jail time going to do ANY of that justice??? Seriously?

• 4 Sentry // Sep 28, 2009 at 11:39 pm

  I think this image pretty much sums it up.

• 5 Teresa // Sep 29, 2009 at 6:00 am

  You didn’t have comments open in LJ for me to respond there: “It seemed the beginning of the promising Hollywood career, but after his conviction for the statutory rape of a 13-year old girl, Polanski fled from America to avoid prison.”

  Statutory rape indicates that while she was too young to technically consent to sexual activity, it was concentual and might not have been as traumatic as you assume. Kind of like the 14 year old girl who was pissed on by R Kelly, she was legally too young to make that decision for herself, but that does not mean that if she hadn’t wanted to be pissed on, she wouldn’t have moved. I’m not saying that he may not have coerced her in some way, or she felt that maybe if she slept with him, she might get into one of his movies, or that she didn’t regret it later. I’m saying statutory rape is much much different from how you are describing her experience.

  Also, it was Polanski’s wife and unborn child killed in the Manson murders. Along with a good portion of his friends…he came back (this is before the “rape” of 1974)from Europe to find them all dead. Who knows how that psychologically f-ed him up. It’s not an excuse. but good grief…if you hate him for the rape you should feel for him for the death of Sharon Tate and that at least should balance itself out. He’s a human being, an animal, as we all are, and just as capable of both wonders and atrocities.

• 6 xiane // Sep 29, 2009 at 6:26 am

  Hey Teresa! I’m blogging over here now, so I’m glad you commented here.

  Before you decide that she was okay with the sex, you might want to read the official court transcript from here: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0720051polanski29.html – trigger warning for those who need to know, and this is the page where she clearly says that she asked to go home and begged him to stop.

  As far as Sharon Tate & the unborn child’s murders go… I do feel for him, but that doesn’t excuse him for preying on underage girls. [He had relations with a 15 year old Natassja Kinksi after the rape in question happened, so this isn't a one-time thing.] These things are not related, and one does not excuse or mitigate the other.

  A 40 year old man who is vastly more worldly than a young girl should ALWAYS be held to a higher standard than this. I don’t hate him. I don’t even hate my raping stepfather, and I have a much more personal reason to do so there. I do hold him in contempt, though.

  Hopefully I’ll see you commenting here on some more pleasant stuff in the future!

• 7 xiane // Sep 29, 2009 at 6:31 am

  Helen:

  Yes, I didn’t even touch that part of it – partially because it hits a bit close to home for me, too. Part of what I’m continually working through is that guilt that comes from not speaking up against my own sexual predator, and the understanding that the pain NEVER goes away fully, no matter if the perpetrator gets “justice” or not. Unfortunately, because it’s already gone into the judicial system, she may not have much say in what happens. Once the charges/sentencing have happened, I believe that it’s pretty much out of the victim’s hands.

  I just hope that no matter what the outcome, she is able to find some peace for herself and her family.

  I really appreciate you coming here to share your perspective. [also, I've missed talking to you!]

• 8 Teresa // Sep 29, 2009 at 6:32 am

  You probably should have that link in your original post then, I was going by what I read on the case in IMDB.

  They may be unrelated, but his liking of young girls either did not exist or was not public until after Tate’s death. If it did not exist, then one might assume there there was a psychological trigger and that they are, in fact linked. Things like having your pregnant wife murdered could trigger a bunch of sh*t that he may not have had the ability to work through.

• 9 xiane // Sep 29, 2009 at 6:58 am

  I wouldn’t count on IMDB to give me a fair and balanced report on the ongoing court case of a famous director, which is why I went right to the source of the court report. I didn’t include that link because it’s all info that’s readily available.

  Perhaps the Tate murder did trigger this, but that doesn’t soften his actions in my mind. If anything, his fame and notoriety had afforded him the luxury to explore his proclivity for young women relatively unpunished and unhindered. There are a lot of places that one could point a finger in this, but it’s expected that one agrees to abide by the law or pay the price, and he knew that before he plied the girl with champagne and quaaludes.
  Polanski was also to be held for 90 days for psychiatric evaluation, and was released after 42 days had passed. That seems to say to me that he was found to be of passable mental state. He managed to get the charge against him downgraded from “rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance (methaqualone) to a minor” to “engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” by plea bargaining, then fled the country after he was released from the psych eval. I have a difficult time excusing him from his crime after all this, sorry. I’m willing to admit that it’s probably because of what I went through in the past. But at the same time, that puts me in the position of understanding intimately how it feels to be used in this way and see the perpetrator walk away relatively unscathed.

• 10 Teresa // Sep 30, 2009 at 6:22 am

  I don’t get much news exposure as I don’t have TV, so I didn’t know ANYTHING about it, let alone that there were new developments. So I went to a celebrity online news source.

  I never knew of any allegations before this what-so-ever. This being said, I can still separate the man and his work. Most great artists are mad, sorry to say, and some are damned violent. It makes them awful human beings, but it does not make their art less viable. There are allegations that Lewis Caroll may have done same to the girl who inspired Alice, but has society thrown out Alice in Wonderland? No. In fact, we’ve embraced it completely, many movies and video games have been based on this tale.

  Now, I cannot stand beside you as someone who underwent sexual abuse, I can’t know what that feels like, so maybe your reaction is more knee-jerk than mine because of that. But it does run rampant in my father. My mother’s side, the men have a tendency to become incestuous pedophiles, whether by nature or nurture, I cannot tell, but there seems to be an inordinate number of them. My mom never let me be alone with my grandfather, ever, and he died when I was 7 months old, but that’s how paranoid she was. And she had right to be. If she didn’t sleep armed, he would have molested her, he did molest my aunt and he also went after my aunt’s youngest daughter. (they didn’t know that for years). His brothers acted similarly, one even having to get his own daughter an abortion. Their father was a reverend who liked little boys, whether that included them, I’ll never know. Of the women in my family, I was the lucky one.

  Now, as far as I know, until I was older, no one even talked about it, let alone tried to take the matter up in court. But the ass who molested my friend’s little girl got off, and I know what my reaction to that would be if it were my daughter, the guy would be dead and I would be in jail.

  But until it happens to me, I distance myself from it, I don’t have the emotional stamina to get worked up over things not directly involving me anymore. I look at it from the outside and look at it objectively.

• 11 Teresa // Oct 1, 2009 at 6:03 am

  “it does run rampant in my father” is supposed to say, “it does run rampant in my family. ” This is what comes when my internet time is all prior to 7am

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