Hitsville was so grossed out by the R. Kelly case (not the verdict, but just writing about the particulars of Kelly’s predilictions) that he didn’t have the stomach to immediately start writing about how repulsive the Roman Polanski documentary on HBO was. (It was first shown a couple of weeks ago, and remains in heavy rotation.)

My interest in the Kelly case came about not because he’s a serial sexual predator who should be put behind bars, but because the press had become so complicit in the celebrity hype machine that the crimes he was accused of had become not even worth mentioning to virtually everyone who wrote about his albums or tours.

It had something to do with a lot of journalists being lazy, but it also had something to do with the Ick Factor.

You’re a pop critic at a podunk paper, and R. Kelly’s coming to town. No one at your paper wants to hear about a child-porn sex tape, much less one that involves the words “urinating” and “on a girl police say is 13 or 14.” It is a firmly held belief of newspaper editors that people don’t want to read about gross stuff over their Rice Krispies. So why not just do the usual fun puff piece promoting the Kelly show, and refer obliquely to some unspecified “legal problems”? It’s a win-win situation.

… Unless you’re the parents of  a teenage girl who goes to the Kelly show, catches the eye of one of Kelly’s henchmen, and gets invited backstage.

But whatever. I feel like I should mention the Polanski case, even though it gets into depressingly similar vomitous territory, because no one else did.

We all know that story: The girl with the stardom-obsessed mother who left her daughter alone with the hedonistic European director so he could do a late-night Vogue photo shoot with her in Jack Nicholson’s mansion. What could possibly have gone wrong?

Nature took its course. Polanski was duly arrested and charged, apparently to his great surprise. (Americains puritains!) Negotitations began for a plea bargain but, as the new HBO documentary demonstrates, Polanski ultimately decided he was about to be the victim of railroaded American justice. You can argue that his fears were well-grounded, as the documentary does, but it’s also true that taking a plane out of LAX and living in luxury in France for the next three decades is an option not generally open to criminals who harbor similar suspicions.

The documentary spends a great deal of time obsessing about Polanski’s endangered legal rights and some amusing footnotes to the case, right down to noting that the judge in the case had a girlfriend or two.

The judge was apparently unmarried, so it’s not clear how this was relevant. (It would actually be irrelevant if he had been married, come to think of it.) Anyway, engrossed in such trivia, the filmmakers nelect to explain properly what Polanski was accused of. He did, as the documentary details, photograph the aspiring young Vogue model naked in a hot tub and then, over her repeated objections, whisk her off to a bedroom for sex.

The fact that he had dosed her with a Quaalude made this all easier. “I was having trouble with coordination like walking and stuff,” the girl later said.

But while the movie mentions the (ambiguous) word sodomy in passing (as only some of the recent coverage of the documentary does) it never explains what that charge stemmed from.

I only know about it because the Smoking Gun web site has posted the original grand jury testimony of the girl. It went something like this:

“Then he lifted up my legs and went in through my anus.”

“What do you mean by that?:

“He put his penis in my butt.”

Polanski was 44 at the time. His difficult life as a Jewish survivor of World War II is mentioned many times in the film, but the fact that the drugged little girl was anally raped isn’t mentioned at all.

Polanski is being protected by the filmmakers, who are unaccountably more entranced with his celebrity than they are with sharing with their audience the salient facts of the case, which makes them both incompetent and unethical.

But Polanski, like Kelly, is also protected by something else: The Ick Factor.

Family activists complain, with some justification, that we live in a coarse world. It’s hard to do anything about it, because the coarseness seems to be what an ever-more-empowered audience demands.

In this context, it’s surprising that men like Polanski and Kelly are able to find themselves charged with deeds that test even today’s broad palette of commonly discussed sexuality. (Entertainers aren’t the only ones, incidentally. There is a certain footnote to the Starr Report, containing words uniquely used there in relation to the Presidency of the United States, that as far as I can ascertain were never repeated in the news pages amid the reams of commentary that that scandal generated.)

But it seems plain that if those charges were repeated as often as we are told of, say, their Grammy and Oscar wins, their diverting music videos or their continental flair, our perception of the men, and their cases, would be somewhat different. In this sense, the true beneficiaries of the Ick Factor are plain.