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Reality check: Polanski’s a rapist

By Margery Eagan
Thursday, October 1, 2009 - Updated 31m ago
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I’d like to give Harrison Ford, Martin
Scorsese, Debra Winger, David Lynch, Tilda Swinton, etc., the benefit of the
doubt. Maybe these Hollywood stars now furiously protesting the re-arrest of
director Roman Polanski don’t actually know what happened 31 years ago.

Here’s the short version: Polanski, then 43, persuaded the mother of
13-year-old Samantha Geimer to let the girl pose privately for him. It could
help her acting career. At the first shoot, he asked her to pose topless. She
felt uncomfortable, but did.

At the second shoot, he took her to Jack Nicholson’s home, gave her champagne
and a Quaalude and told her mother they were running late. Then the middle-aged
man had the drugged and drunken junior high school girl get into the Jacuzzi,
naked.

When he joined her, naked, and touched her, she asked to go home and hid in
the bathroom. He followed her. When he touched her again, she told him,
repeatedly, “No, keep away . . . Stop it . . . Stop it.”

Polanski did not stop. Instead he reached for the underwear she had just put
back on to cover herself and pulled it off.

“Don’t tell your mother about this,” he said.

Polanski was soon indicted for giving drugs to a minor, committing a lewd or
lascivious act upon a child under 14, unlawful sexual intercourse, rape by use
of drugs, rape by oral sex and sodomy. He pleaded guilty to having sex with a
minor, a felony, but then fled the country before his sentencing.

Now Polanski has hired a wired Washington lawyer and his Hollywood friends
are claiming “genius artists” deserve a double standard of justice. Were
Polanski a child-molesting priest or a child-molesting Republican, Hollywood
would be merciless. But in 2003 they gave this genius an Academy Award; now
they’re demanding his freedom.

Had Polanski ever shown remorse, you might feel some empathy. He’s elderly
now. He survived the Holocaust and his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate’s, murder.

But it’s clear Polanksi sees himself as the real victim here. In interviews
he’s complained about being “thrown into a cell surrounded by real criminals” as
if he weren’t one.

He’s said he’s “suffered enough.”

Asked about these “little girls,” he explained, “Well I like young women,
let’s put it that way.”

But Samantha Geimer was not a young woman. She was a girl. And Roman
Polanski, a grossly undeserving martyr, did not “like” this girl.

He raped her.

Roman Polanski - Oct. 1, 2009:

+
Excerpts of grand jury testimony

+
Sharon Tate’s sister: Roman Polanski won’t get fair US
trial

(193)
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