Sex, Drugs, Hollywood and Democratic Rights

LOS ANGELES, Calif., Oct. 24 — For the last month, acclaimed film director Roman Polanski has sat in a prison cell in Zurich, Switzerland, awaiting a hearing to determine whether he will be extradited back to the United States to face trial on charges of having sex with a minor back in 1977.

Polanski, known for films like Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown and The Pianist, was arrested at the Zurich airport by Swiss police on behalf of the U.S. Justice Department.

Calls for Polanski’s release have come from his colleagues throughout Europe and the United States, as well as from government officials in France and Poland, the countries where he was born and raised.

For the past year, Polanski’s lawyers have been trying to have the charges against the award-winning director dismissed. In 2005, the Justice Dept. issued an international arrest warrant for Polanski, which sparked renewed interest in the 31-year-old case.

That interest led to an investigation and eventual exposé of numerous instances of misconduct by the prosecutor and judge in the case. The investigation became the basis of a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which shows, among other things, the prosecutor admitting that he coached the judge for the sentencing.

This is important to note. After Polanski was arrested in 1978, he eventually negotiated an agreement where he would plead guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor” in exchange for no jail time. There was genuine fear by Polanski that the judge, at the behest of the prosecutor, would throw out that deal and impose a long prison term.

That was why Polanski fled the U.S. and returned to his native France to live. Given the prosecutor’s own admission, it was clear that Polanski was about to be double-crossed.

Polanski’s arrest has been used by many of the “middle class,” both “liberal” and reactionary, to construct a moral platform from which they can gleefully hang him. “Liberal feminists” like Katha Pollitt have made an unholy alliance with rightwing ideologues at the Weekly Standard in order to demand Polanski be, in the words of ABC News bobblehead Cokie Roberts, “taken out and shot.”

But as is usual, these “middle class” moralists substitute “truthiness” for the truth.

For example, they quote the grand jury testimony of the victim, neglecting to mention that this testimony was never subjected to cross examination in court, and that the victim herself, now 44 and married, has been trying to get the case dismissed for years.

The obscene level of misconduct and the fact that the victim is calling for Polanski to be released should be enough to bury this case. But the goal here is not “justice.” It never was. Polanski was a perfect target in the late 1970s for the “moral crusade” against sex, drugs, Hollywood and the 1960s.

Moreover, there is more than a whiff of anti-Semitism emanating from Pollitt, the Weekly Standard, Cokie Roberts and the like. The fact that Polanski survived the Holocaust, then lost his wife to the swastika-clad “Family” of Charles Manson in 1969, has not slowed the calls for his lynching.

Even if we think that what Polanski did was reprehensible, even criminal, it is clear that a “fair trial” has been out of the question for over 30 years. A moral vendetta dressed up in legal garb is no less petty revenge.