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Roman Polanski
Turkeys, turkeys, turkeys. They were all over the news this holiday weekend.
First, there was the report that famed film director/infamous rapist Roman Polanski would be released on $4.5 million bail and placed under house arrest to a 19,000 square foot luxury ski chalet in Gstaad. (Remind you of Bernie Madoff?) Several news reports cite French President Nicolas Sarkozy as having been “very effective” in arranging Polanski’s new deal. Sarkozy reportedly never believed Polanski, who is 76, should have been arrested for a crime he committed 32 years ago. Maybe not if the courts were just now getting around to trying him, but Polanski fled the system after being found guilty and before serving his time.
What was most infuriating was the reporting by the Los Angeles Times, the AP and others who said Polanski had sex with a 13 year old. I understand Polanski pleaded guilty to this lesser charge, but the fact is he raped a girl. Sad that the media won’t just call the crime by its name.
Next on the turkey list was ABC. The network was planning to have Chris Brown, the one who beat up Rhianna, on “Good Morning America.” Supposedly, Brown was to give a “tell-all” interview or maybe perform on the show –he has a new album coming out. I just heard, minutes ago, that GMA cancelled and Brown will appear on “20/20″ instead.
Perhaps Brown is contrite. Who knows? But it is still incredibly irresponsible of ABC to give him air time and risk glamourizing him. However, we must consider the ratings.
And the weekend wrapped with plenty of turkey talk following Tiger Woods’ low speed, middle-of-the-night, one car crash. Being human, I too posited theories of what may have lead to the crash. But I won’t share them. First of all, it’s really none of my business. Second, how could I possibly know what happened? I wasn’t there.
But what I will comment on is how quickly the blogosphere, gossip sites and sports sites jumped all over Tiger’s wife, Elin Nordegren, and the woman the National Enquirer says he is romantically involved with, Rachel Uchitel.
MyFoxLA used the headline ”Tiger Woods Drama Comes to Los Angeles” in reference to Uchitel flying out west to meet with her lawyer. SFGate, a blog hosted by the San Francisco Chronicle, points out that Uchitel lives in New York’s Meatpacking District where Glenn Close’s psycho “Fatal Attraction” character lived. And the BleacherReport.com asks about Mrs. Woods, “Is she crazy hot, or is she just plain crazy?”
So the moral of the story is: famous golfer hits a tree, media insults women. Nice.
Check out where he jumps in to defend Roman Polanski. In typical Saletan fashion, Saletan doesn’t think about women or girls as real people with real experiences, no, they’re theoretical ladies whose realities can be flexed like so much intellectual muscle.
His argument:
1) Polanski’s sentence today is going to be more harsh than the one he’d receive in the sexually permissive 70’s, which is plainly unfair.
2) She took drugs, so she practically asked for it.
3) “Everyone wants to f— young girls!” i.e. There’s a difference between being a “pedophile-pedophile” and just a regular ol’ pedophile.
And finally,
4) Because the victim likely reached menarche before the assault, she was sexually mature enough to be assaulted without it being too creepy.
I mean, not creepy like an adult man’s intense interest in the menstrual cycles of children to justify the rape of said children. Or, say, a consistent defense in favor of the violation of women’s bodies.
See Also: Saletan and Polanski
I know I said I didn’t have any sympathy for Roman Polanski before, but after finding out that Polanski still couldn’t be troubled to pay the settlement his accuser won in a civil suit twenty-five years later? Ugh.
I’m never going to write about politics again. I won’t have time. The Dicks Gone Wild news is all-consuming. We got incest, we got rape, we got pedophilia, and now we got David Letterman screwing around with his employees and being blackmailed for it. Jesus.
Some of you will say, “But Violet! How can you compare extramarital sex to crimes like rape and incest?” I’ll tell you how: because they all involve men putting their dicks wherever the hell they want to put their dicks, no matter what. No matter who. Mighty is the dick, and its will is sacred! Nothing must stand in its way! Neither loyalty nor law nor compassion nor basic goddamn human decency shall stay the dick from the swift completion of its desired rounds. All hail the goddamn dick.
Observed in the midst of Jeff Fecke’s post at Alas, A Blog, which is otherwise mostly quite good, on media responses to the recent arrest of child rapist film director Roman Polanski:
Many, many articles cited the fact that the victim, now grown up and 45 years old, has said she wants the case to be let go, because each time it gets dredged up it brings up painful memories of her being raped. I choose the Telegraph because its headline puts the word victim in scare quotes, because…something:
In January, [the victim]1 filed a legal declaration in Los Angeles formally requesting that the outstanding charges against Polanski be withdrawn.
She said Los Angeles prosecutors’ insistence that Polanski must return to the United States before dismissal of the case could be considered as a “cruel joke being played on me”.
She also voiced anger that authorities had detailed her grand jury testimony in related hearings to the case.
“True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother,” she said, adding that it was time for closure.
“I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr Polanski may have caused me as a child,” she said. Polanski had taken flight, she said, “because the judicial system did not work.”
Jeff’s reply:
I understand the victim’s feelings on this. And I sympathize, I do. But for good or ill, the justice system doesn’t work on behalf of victims; it works on behalf of justice. …
No doubt.
And that’s exactly why 90% of rapes still go unreported.
Because the government court systems which rape survivors are expected to go through, if they report the crimes committed against them, are deliberately unresponsive to women’s wishes, take control out of women’s hands, and do it all because they believe that there is some kind of justice
that can be gained independently of, or even in direct violation of, the wishes of the victim for safety and restitution for past wrongs. That, in the alleged interests of society
(which, typically, means the interests of the state, or, even more typically, the ambitions of the prosecutor), are willing to go on with the prosecution of a woman’s rape, whether or not she wants them to, and even if she publicly states that the government’s prosecution is proceeding against her will, out of her control, and it will hurt her for it to continue.
When the justice system
doesn’t work on behalf of victims, the justice system
is an asshole.
Here’s Whoopi Goldberg on The View explaining that Roman Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old girl wasn’t “rape-rape”:
I’m pretty sure that what Whoopi is insinuating here is that the girl didn’t resist or say no. The other panelists make the point that this is irrelevant, since a child can’t legally consent to sex anyway. That’s correct. Though as a point of fact, the girl in the Polanski case did say no and did resist (as much as she was able to in her drugged state — said drugs being provided by her rapist, one Roman Polanski).
At any rate, I know a bunch of you have already seen this, but I don’t watch The View. I’ve just now finally gotten around to looking up the clip. So here’s my question:
Jesus God in heaven, what the fuck is up with this shit??? Is The View always this bad? Are these women always this moronic?
How can they be so anti-feminist? For that matter, how they can be so ill-informed? It’s like Larry King times four. Whoopi keeps going on and on about the importance of “having the facts” of the case, so why the fuck didn’t they get the facts before tape rolled? There’s a giant-ass picture of Polanski behind them on the set, so clearly they knew the topic would be under discussion. Yet they go out there, completely unprepared, and start yammering about “rape-rape” and how the girl wanted it and the mommy set it up and whatever other bullshit defense attorney press releases they half-remember from 1978.
And speaking of the mommy business: notice how that’s the one thing the women all agree on? At the end of the segment they all join together to kevtch about how awful the rape victim’s mother must be. Put her on trial! Her and Polanski!
Obviously The View is no bastion of feminism — or of journalism or common sense or anything else. But I really had no idea it was this bad.
[Trigger warning. Any and all rape apology will be deleted from this thread.]
I’ve been skeptical about the efficacy of trigger warnings in the past, but after reading post after post on the Polanski case on the blogs, and seeing the story cycle through news media hour after hour, and hearing the story discussed by acquaintances day after day, I can safely say I’ve been officially triggered for the first time in eight years, trigger warnings or not.
I was raped when I was thirteen years old. It was my first sexual experience, if you consider rape a “sexual experience.” There are some things that are private and will remain private about the incident, because I do not want to also trigger my family who still unnecessarily feel responsibility for the incident, but regardless, I was raped when I was thirteen years old. I kept it a secret for a long time because I thought it was my fault, and due to the five-year emotional spiral that resulted after I was raped, everyone around me was unable to discern whether I was being truthful when I finally gave my problem a name.
So when I’m reading the opinions about whether Roman Polanski should be extradited and prosecuted for drugging and raping a child, whether or not it was thirty-two years ago, whether or not the man is elderly today, whether or not punishment deters crime, whether or not the man is powerful and successful, whether or not our outrage is inspired by a hatred of all things libertine, whether or not the rapist is remorseful, and whether or not a child rapist has the support of the rich and powerful behind him, I think about a few things:
After years of therapy, personal reflection, and healthy, consensual sexual relationships, after relieving myself of the burden of feeling that I’d “gotten myself raped,” after (today) fifteen years, I thought it was behind me. I am surprised that it’s not. I’m equally surprised at my surprise.
What does rape do to you? Afterward? It changed me; there is before and after. Before, a child, playing with Barbies, looking sideways at boys, wondering. After, confusion. Depression. A litany of fuck-ups and fuck-its, whatevers, mistakes, trusting no one, least of all myself. Before, sex was mysterious; after, miasma. I was tarred as a Lolita. I was called jail bait.
Rape is not the only assault. Around rape is a large segment of the population that questions the victim, a culture that looks down on victims for allowing themselves to be victimized, or keep them victimized, questions about the victim’s credibility, questions about the legacy of rape and how bad it is, because how bad is rape really? Rape, because various levels and forms of sexual assault are systemic and pervasive across all societies, exists alongside one’s experiences of unwanted touching, wanted touching, sexual objectification, sexual desire, sexual harassment, incest, love, leering eyes, cat calls, roaming hands, consent, confusion, tits, vagina, rectum, penis, mouth, rape and not-rape, all of it loaded, all of it veering at rape’s ugly legacy, co-mingling, the legacy that tells us to be more careful, to dress more conservatively, to BE BETTER AT BEING VULNERABLE, or BE MORE POWERFUL, or BE MORE FEARFUL, or GET OVER IT ALREADY. Rape leaks into healthy, consensual experiences. It lingers. It pervades.
I’ve long had an irrational hatred of Roman Polanski, to the point where I’ve openly, publicly, and venomously criticized people I mostly agree with for daring to say they even like his movies. On political and aesthetic levels, I have some trivial issues with the portrayal of women in his movies, but I find him so loathsome because of who he is (a fugitive rapist) and what he’s done (he drugged and raped a thirteen year old girl). What happened is public record. He raped Samantha Gailey when she was a thirteen year old girl. He groomed a girl, possibly two that we know of, to be sexually abused by him. I was raped when I was a thirteen year old girl. The man who raped me, who is nameless and faceless in my memories, groomed me over the course of several days to lure me into his room. The man who raped me was never brought to justice, was never reported. He knew I was thirteen because I told him, he knew I didn’t consent because I told him no. I cried, there was blood, there was a lot of blood. I was afraid of him and of what would happen to me when it was discovered that I’d “had sex.” I ran, I hid, I withheld, I self-destructed, and afterward I willingly invited people into my life who would further take advantage of and abuse me. I think of Polanski and I think of the man who raped me. I wonder who he is, where he is now, and if he hurt other people like he hurt me, whether their families suffered the turmoil mine did. All of it unnecessary.
I also wonder if you ever really “get over it.” Today I’ve been mulling over a passage Melissa wrote, herself a rape survivor, about Gailey’s request to drop the case against Polanski:
When justice is denied, or interminably deferred, often one finds a way of closing the chapter, just to get on with life—to be able to live unencumbered by an ever-present sensation of imbalance. One longs desperately to evade the niggling feeling that you’re betraying yourself, or upending some karmic sense of justice, merely by getting on with your life as though there had been a satisfactory and fair resolution, when there hasn’t been.
When there is no justice to free you, no closure, it can feel as though not living as a victim tacitly condones what was done, retroactively making it not matter. Survivors of sexual assault whom the law has failed often feel they must serve a sentence of suffering themselves, beyond what they might otherwise naturally bear, in order to not join in the ubiquitous chorus trumpeting that what happened to them was No Big Deal…
…Given the opportunity now for the legal justice I was denied, I daresay I’d sound an awful lot like Gailey. It’s not that my feelings toward my rapist have changed; it’s that what closure I have was hard-won—and I fiercely protect it.
I go back and forth about the effects rape had on my young self, and the legacy it has on me today, but I know this: It’s a big fucking deal and it still matters. Eventually, I finally got along with life. I spent years in therapy teasing out the details of the afterward before I could have a healthy relationship with my loved ones again. I owned what mistakes were mine, made goals and achieved them. And as Melissa says, what closure I got was hard-won. It is mine, and it was earned with my sweat and blood and the passage of many years. But what I’ve realized this week is that it’s never really over.
I don’t have a concrete opinion on whether Polanski should be extradited to the United States to face sentencing for a sexual assault he has eluded for over thirty years. But then, I have no artistic fondness or personal sympathy for him whatsoever. Neither am I comfortable with letting him walk away from his crimes absolved of responsibility even though Gailey wants the subject dropped. Rape has an immeasurable legacy, one that is not taken seriously enough by the public or by the law, and I’m not hard-pressed to admit I want to see more rapists brought to justice. The political is personal, too.
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