No Immunity for Predators of Minors

(by Mike James, Catholic Standard, 4 October, 2009 )

No immunity for predators of Minors

BY MIKE JAMES

Roman Polanski, celebrated Franco-Polish Film director of the Oscar winning Pianist set in Nazi Occupied Poland, and other film classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, was arrested last week in Switzerland on an outstanding conviction of the rape of a 13 year-old girl in Los Angeles in 1977 when the director was then 44.

He had been charged with drugging, and then raping and sodomizing the 13 year old girl after he had gotten permission from her mother for him to take photos of her at another movie director’s home for the French edition of Vogue magazine which Polanski was guest editing. Under the US legal option of “plea bargaining” offered so as to spare the child the horror of having to testify to her ordeal in court, Polanski pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of engaging in sex with a minor and was convicted. However, he failed to appear in court on the date set for sentencing and fled the country to France where he has since been living.

Successive French administrations ignored the long standing US court application for Polanski to be deported to face sentencing and the additional charge of fleeing the legal jurisdiction where he had been convicted. However his previously publicly announced arrival in Switzerland to receive a Lifetime Film Director’s award gave Swiss and US authorities time to process the charges for his detention on extradition charges.

What is quite astounding in the case in the huge international clamour from celebrities and politicians around the world calling for Polanski to be released without being sentenced for his admitted crime.

French minister of Culture and Communication, Frederic Mitterrand, led the charge declaring "the sight of him thrown to the lions for an old story which doesn't make much sense, imprisoned while traveling to an event that was intending to honour him: caught, in short, in a trap, is absolutely dreadful". Hollywood stars joined in the chorus, claiming that Polanski, had had a difficult life, that his mother, a Catholic Jewess, had died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, that his first wife Sharon Tate had been murdered by cult leader Charles Manson, and that he did not deserve more suffering. His victim, now a 45 year old married mother of three, who had a civil case against Polanski, settled out of court for an undisclosed sum of money, has publicly called for the case to be dropped, declaring that decades of publicity as well as the prosecutor's focus on lurid details of the assault continues to traumatize her and her family.

The reaction is not much different from that right across the Caribbean, where powerful and well connected men routinely have the most serious cases of assault and rape of women and children settled out of court “for undisclosed sums of money” or by the real and frightening threat that victims appearing in court will have to undergo further gross violation of their dignity and self esteem under mocking cross-examination.

Internationally however, world opinion has begun to become less tolerant of sexual exploitation of minors. Joan Smith a British Author and human rights activist sums up the growing revulsion at those who make excuses for sexual exploiters. She writes, “Now the past has caught up with him, and Polanski is facing extradition and the prison sentence he deserves. His supporters urgently need to locate their moral compass and stop making excuses for an unrepentant sex attacker.”

Condemnation of the acts of those who exploit children is not something new. Jesus was so emphatic on the issue that three of the Gospels (Matt 18:6, Luke 17:2, Mark 9:42) quote him verbatim with this, perhaps his strongest condemnation in all his teaching and preaching. One passage is so powerful it is worth repeating in full

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Jesus called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.(Matthew 18:1-6)

Exploitation of minors, especially sexual exploitation and abuse, is intolerable, whoever practices it, whether they be celebrity film stars or well placed politicos, whether inside or outside the church. Such predators may not have to have a millstone literally hung around their necks, but they must face the legal and moral consequences of their actions. In Zurich or Los Angeles. Or Georgetown, Guyana.