This has really been bothering me, and I am relieved to see an article about it.

doesn't write the tag line. that being said ~

misunderstood rapist(s) dotdotdot

do wHAt?

Agreed facts:

Drugs provided

13 years old

Anal "sex"

I dunno, with those agreed facts, if it had been me, I would seriously expect to do some jail time. Unless you actually believe that there are legions of 13 year old girls dieing to do drugs and have anal sex with much older troubled European directors. No doubt because "everyone was doing it."

Scumbag. Do your time, you asshole.

i know when i was a 13 year old girl, i was often mistaken

for being

39.

"Forgiveness means not wanting revenge."

It seems that Polanski's victim has managed to put this awful event behind her.

But I always wonder, "How can one forgive when the transgressor refuses to repent?"

Polanski has been frozen in time for nearly 3 decades. He comes across as childish (as well as creepily criminal). This crime is what defines him, what most people think of first when they hear his name. There is, at least, poetic justice, if not criminal justice.

Thanks for bringing all the information to light. On the Internet Movie Data Base there is a long running battle on the message boards where a disturbing number of people either deny or cavalierly dismiss what Polanski actually did. The misconduct of the trial judge should not overshadow Polanski's terrible crime.

If Roman Polanski did this today, he would get approximately 31 years as a prison sentence if convicted for these crimes. Unless there is financial incentive requiring his return to the United States, or he wants to visit the Playboy Mansion in the age of Viagra, there seems to be little reason for him to try and make this move.

But I always wonder, "How can one forgive when the transgressor refuses to repent?"

Because forgiveness isn't about the transgressor, it's about the one transgressed against. If I decided to forgive someone who has wronged me, it doesn't matter if he repents or not, because I'm forgiving him for my own peace of mind. That's why it's often referred to as "letting go" - if you expect remorse, then you haven't let go of anything. True forgiveness means releasing everything, including your expectation of what the sinner will or will not think or do.

Thank you, Mr. Wyman and Salon, for prominently publishing this (astonishingly) necessary antidote to the romanticized version of Polanski's rape case. I haven't seen "Wanted and Desired" because every review I read seemed to indicate that the documentary neglected the obvious in favor of the frivolous. Your article confirms this suggestion.

There are many shades of rape, none of them remotely excusable. Even for those inclined to take a soft-focus view, nothing about Polanski's crime supports such an attitude. His victim may have forgiven him; it doesn't mean that either the justice system or the court of public opinion should pardon him.

I take issue with this line in the article:

ignoring her protests, had sex with her; and then anally raped her

If he "had sex with her" then he "raped" her -- statutorily, at a minimum -- regardless of the orifice, right? The article seems to play on a certain sensationalist view of anal intercourse as something indisputably monstrous and irredeemably brutal, and as though it would have been somehow less noxious, less of a "rape" for him to have put his penis in her vagina instead.

I appreciated this article. I did not know the facts about the girl's assault. Often, it's stated that she was "seduced" by Polanski, not raped.

I think that so many people have trouble with the idea that he was a rapist in that he was good-looking and rich. They just can't get their minds around the idea that people who don't LOOK predatory--who look privileged, in fact--can still do awful things.

Am I burning out memory cells or was the victim in this case Nastasia Kinsky, who was being exploited as an early teen by countless studios, using adult and pedophilic plots and near nude filmings.

Those movies gave me the creeps way back then. Roman Polanski wasn't the only one taking advantage of this subteen back then...

Let's drag em all before the Judge.

Roman needs to come home so he can be properly appreciated

This is not to excuse Polanski's actions, or to argue that he didn't deserve prison time. We certainly needed a corrective to the oh-poor-Roman stories. But Wyman's story is curiously one-sided also. He never mentions the important point that Polanski's lawyers and the prosecution had agreed upon a plea-bargain that would keep Polanski from serving additional prison time, and that the judge changed his mind at the last minute due to the interference of a prosecutor who was not involved with the case. Yes, the documentary was unnecessarily one-sded, but so is Wyman's article.

...begin to call it such? It's lazy journalism, and it implies that the victim consented to the act. Roman Polanski didn't "have sex" with this girl. He raped her.

I believe that Polanski subsequently had a relationship with Kinski, but she was not the victim in this case.

So this piece of Euro-trash wants to come back into the country? Maybe he and Woody Allen should start their own little conclave where it is okay to rape children as long as you apologise for it because you were belittled as a child or happened to be born a Jew. Puh-leeze! These guys should be castrated. By the by, I always thought that their movies licked hairy balls and I have seen all of them.

I have seen the movies and not the hairy balls! Sorry about that! LOL

...has the full testimony of the victim. She was 13, and he gave her both champagne and Quaaludes. And then he anally raped her after discovering that she wasn't on the pill, which made vaginally raping her less attractive.

Most 13 year old girls aren't on the pill, Roman.

This isn't a case of two people in a relationship that got out of hand, or a misunderstanding, or anything vague or ambiguous, or gray. It's just a case of a guy in his 40s raping a 13 year old girl who told him "no."

He needs to serve his time.