The NYT story on Roman Polanski’s absurd ongoing legal attempt to get his child-sex conviction overturned continues many papers’ Polanski-centric view of the case.

The story is interesting for two reasons. One, while superficially making clear that Polanski is a fugitive and had been convicted, it’s told throughout as if something strange is afoot.

Example:

Although this is happening long after Mr. Polanski admitted guilt in the original incident, the effort has raised uncomfortable questions about how justice operates in a legal system that has never quite come to terms with Hollywood, despite this city’s long, and growing, list of famous malefactors.

Emphasis added. As we have seen myriad times, the chief “uncomfortable question” raised by such cases is how rich and famous people manage to get off most of the time. Here, Polanski didn’t, so he skipped town, and hasn’t exactly been living off the land since. The legal issues Polanski has been trying to raise are largely invented, and even if they weren’t Polanski had the money to pursue an appeal. But he didn’t appeal; he left town.

Yet Mr. Polanski’s case has only become more troubling over the years. That happened as tawdry details of his behavior — some of them described in grand jury testimony that was made public only in 2002 — were matched by accounts of official wrongdoing that occasionally seemed to mirror the tone, if not quite the magnitude, of dealings portrayed in Mr. Polanski’s Los Angeles noir classic, “Chinatown.”

Note how this “uncomfortable” case has become “troubling.” We’ll get back to the tawdry details in a minute, but let’s take a look at the Chinatown-like wrongdoing. Since Chinatown involved murder, massive fraud, suborning of governmental processes, and one rococo scene of nostril-splitting, even something not quite of that magnitude seems promising. “Among other things,” the Times tells us,

… Mr. Wells [a prosecutor], in an interview in the film, said he prodded Judge Rittenband with a photograph of Mr. Polanski in the company of two girls, taken in Germany before the sentencing. “‘Judge,’ I said, ‘Look here. He’s flipping you off,’ ” Mr. Wells recalled.

Mr. Wells has also recalled that the remark was routine and that he said it in open court, but the Times story doesn’t say that. Not very Chinatown-esque. The risibly one-sided HBO film, incidentally, spends a lot of time trying to explain away the photo of what seemed to be Polanksi having a very gay time in a German beer hall. The film fell off my tivo so I don’t have it available right now, but I’m not sure that the Times’ use of the word “girls” in that passage is correct, unless the paper is using it in a Polanskian, continental sort of way.

(Incidentally, while the HBO film tried to portray the judge as something of a buffoon, it didn’t tell viewers that he was smart enough to have entered Harvard Law at 15 years of age.)

The other matters in the case seem small as well, as Polanski’s lawyers have seized upon this or that word in email messages from the court in an effort to divert attention to the main issue in the case, which are that he’s a fugitive and that fugitives don’t get to dictate terms when they finally get hauled back before a judge.

Finally, those “tawdry details”: The story ends with these grafs, the first time I think that a major U.S. paper details exactly what Polanski was accused of, emphasis added.

If anything, the case may have become more difficult to resolve over time. The sexual abuse of minors has become a more potent concern, and the recently released details of Mr. Polanski’s relationship with Ms. Geimer cast a particularly sordid light on the incident. By her account before grand jurors at the time, Ms. Geimer was plied with alcohol and Quaaludes, and objected repeatedly as she was subjected to vaginal and anal sex.

The details were not “recently released,” incidentally, and the story doesn’t mention that the documentary didn’t detail these charges either.  And note how the writer lets Polanski’s attorney get the last word:

For the elder Mr. Dalton, who urged Mr. Polanski to pursue redress after reviewing the documentary, however, the issue turned from the original crime to questions about the way authorities here handled it.

“This case before the court is not about him,” Mr. Dalton said. “It is about the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County.”

Dalton was given a lot of time in the documentary to spin wildly for Polanski, so it’s not surprising that he managed to convince himself that he was correct after seeing it.

And again, the issue is framed in a way that’s kind to the director. A more detached account might go, “Polanski’s attorneys, in the HBO documentary and in the time since, have been trying to keep the focus off the crimes the director was accused of and on whatever challenges they were making at the time to the proceedings.”

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Previously in Hitsville:

Roman Polanski: The Ick Factor
The Polanski whitewash continues
P.S. on ‘The Polanski whitewash’
Whitewashing Polanski, continued