The Polanski whitewash continues
Roman Polanski is seizing on a scene from the recent documentary about his child-rape case to try yet again to get his case dismissed:
Mr. Polanski and his lawyer have asked the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to review a new documentary in which a former deputy district attorney claims to have coached the judge in the case.
In the film, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” the former prosecutor, David Wells, describes advising Judge Laurence J. Rittenband to send Mr. Polanski to prison for a psychiatric review, though Mr. Wells was not involved with the case.
I like this story because it demonstrates how bad art can have real-world effects. You can read the story and judge for yourself how farfetched this issue is. (Wells, the former DA, says the exchange happened in open court and was routine.)
The film, which was directed by Marina Zenovich, remains fundamentally dishonest; it portrays the judge in the case as a womanizing spotlight-whore, and Polanksi as a benign continental roue who found himself on the wrong side of a moralizing America legal system.
The documentary elides over the fact that the events were far from a romantic evening at Marlon Brando’s Jack Nicholson’s house. The girl in the case told police that Polanski drugged her, photographed her nude, had sex with her … and then anally raped her.
Polanski wasn’t convicted of those charges, but the film is dishonest by not fully detailing what the girl said at the time. (The film uses the word “sodomy” in passing, but that’s a legally ambiguous term. It quotes from what the girl told police, but bowdlerizes her bluntest testimony—”He stuck his penis in my butt”—and doesn’t dwell on the added trauma for the 13 year old of having to speak publicly on such matters.)
The woman was quoted in recent years saying that she forgave Polanski, but that, too, excuses neither the original act nor the film’s essential expurgation of the contemporary facts of the case.
(The movie is doubly complicit by allowing Polanski’s lawyer, Douglas Dalton, a lot of screen time to tell us how honest he’s going to be with us—”You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts,” he intones—though both he and the filmmaker are keeping some of them hidden. Dalton, incidentally, is described as being retired but in fact is still representing Polanski.)
As for the judge, the film systematically ridicules him, right down to playfully numbering the two (!) girlfriends the (unmarried) jurist apparently had. A NYT story about Zenovich and her film last year has a lot of information about the judge that Zenovich shared with the Times reporter but did not, in the end, share with her audience. Like this:
The judge […] was a poor Brooklyn boy who, upon graduating high school at 15, bypassed undergraduate work for New York University Law School; he later attended Harvard, because he was too young to take the New York bar exam, graduating Phi Beta Kappa.
Hard to square that with the cartoon presented in the film. The Times story on Polanski’s latest legal gambit does, however, make this observation:
In general, Mr. Dalton acknowledged, fugitives have little standing to press conventional appeals.
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Previously in Hitsville:
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I’m unconvinced. Bill, you wrote in your first post on this subject that it was irrelevant that the judge had two girlfriends - you even went so far as to say that if the judge were married, it would still be irrelevant. So how are the facts of the judge’s achievements early in life any more relevant?
Likewise, how is it fundamentally dishonest for the film to present what is essentially a defense case for Polanski? You make the point repeatedly that the film doesn’t offer a raw description of what Polanski did with the girl, but your other criticisms seem to center on the tone of the movie, that Polanski is treated with a respect you think he doesn’t deserve, and that figures that you respect, such as the judge, are ridiculed. But there’s nothing dishonest about taking a tone. As for the nature of the sexual act, it’s only relevant if you believe, as you may, that illegal sex that involves the anus is worse than, and should be considered separately from, illegal sex that involves the vagina. That’s something that many would agree with you on, I’m sure, but it’s more of an emotional position than a reasoned one. Let me be clear: sex with a 13-year-old is, and should always be, criminal. But actions that are considered to be aggravating (in the legal sense) should be considered so because of they are cruel and additionally traumatizing, not because they’re outside of the sexual mainstream.
I haven’t yet had the opportunity to see the film, so I can’t defend it. I’ll just say that based on what you’ve said about it, I can’t tell that it’s dishonest. In the legal system, the prosecution presents its case, and leaves out details that could lead the jury to sympathize with the defendant, such as a 60s bomber’s fifteen years of charity work before apprehension. Likewise, the defense omits details that might sway the jury the other way. The case against Polanski has been covered in the media - anybody in the US who’s heard of Polanski knows that he fled the country after having sex with a minor child. Until now, I don’t think the defense case has been presented. I suspect that your great revulsion toward Polanski’s crime, Bill, may cause you to condemn any defense case that’s made for him.
it was jack nicholson’s house, not marlon brando’s!
Ouch, thanks for the correx. Fixed.