POLANSKI A FREE MAN—MORE REACTION

A not unhappy Roman Polanski is freed by Swiss court


Opinion
By Richard Cohen
(For the Washington Post)

The Swiss got it right. Their refusal to extradite film director Roman Polanski to the United States on a 33-year-old sex charge is the proper dénouement for this mess of a case. There is no doubt that Polanski did what he did, which is have sex with a 13-year-old after plying her with booze. There is no doubt also that after all these years there is something stale about the case, not to mention a “victim,” Samantha Geimer, who has long ago forgiven her assailant and dearly wishes the whole thing would go away. So do I.

There are only bad reasons to proceed with the prosecution. The first is to rebut the argument that some sort of legal or moral exception ought to be made for Polanski on account of his talent. Having just seen his film “The Pianist” for the second time, I salute his genius as, if I knew something about poetry, I might that of Ezra Pound.

Pound was both a traitor and an anti-Semite, but he was anyway awarded the Bollingen Prize by the Library of Congress for his “Pisan Cantos,” written as it happens soon after World War II, while US authorities had him imprisoned in Italy. He was finally incarcerated as an incompetent in St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he continued to write, while all sorts of other incompetents -- famous intellectuals -- continued to debate his worthiness. Into this controversy stepped the clear-headed art critic Clement Greenberg:

“I am sick of the… silliness which condones almost any moral or intellectual failing on the artist’s part as long as he is or seems a successful artist. It is still justifiable to demand that he be a successful human being before anything else, even at the cost of his art.” It seems pretty clear that, at least back in 1977, Polanski was not a successful human being.

It does not matter to me either that Polanski is a Holocaust survivor; not, even, that his wife Sharon Tate -- pregnant at the time -- was murdered in 1969 by Charles Manson and his so-called “Family.” Lots of people survived the Holocaust and other tragedies, and few of them committed crimes.

The only argument in favor of Polanski’s continued freedom is that he is the victim of judicial misconduct. He had good reason to believe that the trial judge in his case was going to break the plea agreement and throw the book at him. He had already pleaded guilty to a reduced charge; he had already spent 42 days in Chino State Prison under psychiatric examination. (Another analogy to the Pound case -- a talented person must be nuts to do something so wrong.) He ran from the prospect of a judge who was going to make his reputation at Polanski’s expense and send him to jail for a very long time. I would have done the same.

It was this alleged -- but virtually proven -- miscarriage of justice that impressed the Swiss authorities and why they rejected the American requests for extradition. That was good. It would have been better, though, if at the same time they denounced the many artists and intellectuals who haughtily dismissed what Polanski had done on the basis of his talent and achievements. They thought of his films; they should have thought of their own daughters.


Read this editorial on the Washington Post site

UPDATE: Polanski only safe in France, Poland, Switzerland (AP)

"Oh darn! If only I would have known I could only travel (free as a bird) between my lux villa in Gstaad, the delights of Paris, the delights of Paris, Carla, the Cannes Film Festival, Tahiti, and all of France, Switzerland, and Poland, I would have preferred to rot in a California prison!"

--Roman Polanski


Samantha Geimer re: Roman Polanski: “Enough Is Enough”