What is most interesting about "Wanted and Desired" is that prosecutor Gunson and defense attorney Dalton, as well as Geimer's attorney Silver, all agree that Judge Rittenband acted improperly, attempting to stage-manage events in a way that was out of legal bounds.

"Despite what he did, Polanski was screwed over by the judge, he fled because the judge pulled the rug out from under him," Zenovich says. "It was like Polanski was caught in one of his movies, this kind of stuff isn't supposed to happen, everyone was shocked that a judge would behave like this." As Polanski himself puts it in an archival clip, "I was a mouse made sport of by an abominable cat."

http://theenvelope.latimes.com/movies/filmfestivals/sundance2008/env-et-polanski17jan17,0,4818835.story

BRAND: But he is - he's blamed by not only Polanski and Polanski's defense attorney but also the prosecutor for a miscarriage of justice.

Ms. ZENOVICH: Yeah, I mean, when I was interviewing the lawyers and discovered what had happened kind of behind closed doors, I was astounded.

BRAND: So, what happened? What did he do that was the issue?

Ms. ZENOVICH: Polanski pleads guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. The punishment was supposed to be based on a probation report. The judge got the probation report and it said that he wasn't a mentally disordered sex offender and the he shouldn't go to jail. And I think he was feeling a lot of pressure and didn't know what to do, so he started enlisting advice from Richard Brenneman who was a young journalist for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook at the time. He said, you know, I went into his chambers and he looked at me and said, Dick, tell me, what do I do about Polanski?

Mr. RICHARD BRENNEMAN (Journalist): I went, whoa, Your Honor, that's your decision, that's not mine. I'm a reporter, I can't advise you on something like that. I hadn't been covering courts that long, but I knew a decision by a judge was supposed to be a decision by a judge and was not to take in any advice from any other person other than what was there on the law books, what had been entered into evidence in the case.

Ms. ZENOVICH: I mean it's all this kind of manipulation of how these cases work.

BRAND: So Polanski gets wind of this and he...

Ms. ZENOVICH: Well, Polanski goes for the 90-day diagnostic. He's told by his lawyer, you know, keep your chin up, this is it. At the end of this you are going to be free because, basically, that's what the judge told the lawyers. And the judge calls the lawyers into chambers and says, I've changed my mind. You know, I want him to go back to jail, or I want him to be deported. I mean, he was just kind of spouting whatever. I don't think he knew what to do. And in the end, Polanski ended up not knowing what was ahead of him. And you know, I don't want to give the movie away but, you know, he flees.

BRAND: What do the principals say now? What does the prosecutor say now about it?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91316788

The key figure in the film, arguably, is neither Polanski nor Geimer, but Judge Laurence J Rittenband, who had presided over such celebrity cases as Elvis and Priscilla Presley's divorce. Rittenband, who died in 1993, emerges from the documentary as a bon viveur who divided his time between the courtroom and his country club, and who relished showbiz connections. And, Zenovich adds,"I find great irony in the fact that he had a girlfriend 30 years younger than him."

Hoping to preserve Geimer's anonymity, her attorney Lawrence Silver arranged for Polanski to plea-bargain, to keep the case from going to trial. Accordingly, Polanski pleaded guilty to the lowest of the counts against him, unlawful sexual intercourse. A probation report recommended against a custodial sentence, but Rittenband decreed that Polanski should have a spell undergoing "'diagnostic study" at Chino State Prison. However, he agreed to defer Polanski's custody to allow him to work on his next project, an action epic called Hurricane. At this point, Polanski made a massive tactical gaffe: on a trip to Europe, he allowed himself to be photographed, cigar in hand and surrounded by young women, at the Munich Oktoberfest. Rittenband was furious; when Polanski returned to LA, he was sent straight to Chino.

Polanski was released after 42 days of his 90-day term, but here the story gets complicated. Polanski had been led to believe by Rittenband that after Chino, his time behind bars would be over. However, the judge was overheard boasting at his country club that he would put Polanski away "for 100 years".

This was just part of Rittenband's bizarre behaviour. We learn from Zenovich's film that the judge, anxious to impress on the media that he was in control of proceedings, twice proposed to prosecuting Assistant District Attorney Roger Gunson and to Polanski's defence lawyer Douglas Dalton that they should plead their cases to him, after which he would pronounce a sentence that he had decided beforehand - in effect, amounting to a mock trial. We learn that Rittenband was inordinately influenced by publicity, and that, quite inappropriately, he solicited other people's advice on how he should act: one of them, reporter Richard Brenneman, who was startled to be asked, "What the hell do I do with Polanski?"

Reminder: Roman Polanski raped a child

Kate Harding

Sep. 28, 2009 |

Roman Polanski raped a child. Let's just start right there, because that's the detail that tends to get neglected when we start discussing whether it was fair for the bail-jumping director to be arrested at age 76, after 32 years in "exile" (which in this case means owning multiple homes in Europe, continuing to work as a director, marrying and fathering two children, even winning an Oscar, but never -- poor baby -- being able to return to the U.S.). Let's keep in mind that Roman Polanski gave a 13-year-old girl a Quaalude and champagne, then raped her, before we start discussing whether the victim looked older than her 13 years, or that she now says she'd rather not see him prosecuted because she can't stand the media attention. Before we discuss how awesome his movies are or what the now-deceased judge did wrong at his trial, let's take a moment to recall that according to the victim's grand jury testimony, Roman Polanski instructed her to get into a jacuzzi naked, refused to take her home when she begged to go, began kissing her even though she said no and asked him to stop; performed cunnilingus on her as she said no and asked him to stop; put his penis in her vagina as she said no and asked him to stop; asked if he could penetrate her anally, to which she replied, "No," then went ahead and did it anyway, until he had an orgasm.

Can we do that? Can we take a moment to think about all that, and about the fact that Polanski pled guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, before we start talking about what a victim he is? Because that would be great, and not nearly enough people seem to be doing it.

The French press, for instance (at least according to the British press) is describing Polanski "as the victim of a money-grabbing American mother and a publicity-hungry Californian judge." Joan Z. Shore at the Huffington Post, who once met Polanski and "was utterly charmed by [his] sobriety and intelligence," also seems to believe that a child with an unpleasant stage mother could not possibly have been raped: "The 13-year old model 'seduced' by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies." Oh, well, then! If her mom put her into that situation, that makes it much better! Shore continues: "The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday, which was the age of consent in California. (It's probably 13 by now!) Polanski was demonized by the press, convicted, and managed to flee, fearing a heavy sentence."

Wow, OK, let's break that down. First, as blogger Jeff Fecke says, "Fun fact: the age of consent in 1977 in California was 16. It's now 18. But of course, the age of consent isn't like horseshoes or global thermonuclear war; close doesn't count. Even if the age of consent had been 14, the girl wasn't 14." Also, even if the girl had been old enough to consent, she testified that she did not consent. There's that. Though of course everyone makes a bigger deal of her age than her testimony that she did not consent, because if she'd been 18 and kept saying no while he kissed her, licked her, screwed her and sodomized her, this would almost certainly be a whole different story -- most likely one about her past sexual experiences and drug and alcohol use, about her desire to be famous, about what she was wearing, about how easy it would be for Roman Polanski to get consensual sex, so hey, why would he need to rape anyone? It would quite possibly be a story about a wealthy and famous director who pled not guilty to sexual assault, was acquitted on "she wanted it" grounds, and continued to live and work happily in the U.S. Which is to say that 30 years on, it would not be a story at all. So it's much safer to focus on the victim's age removing any legal question of consent than to get tied up in that thorny "he said, she said" stuff about her begging Polanski to stop and being terrified of him.

Second, Polanski was "demonized by the press" because he raped a child, and was convicted because he pled guilty. He "feared heavy sentencing" because drugging and raping a child is generally frowned upon by the legal system. Shore really wants us to pity him because of these things? (And, I am not making this up, boycott the entire country of Switzerland for arresting him.)

As ludicrous as Shore's post is, I have to agree with Fecke that my favorite Polanski apologist is the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum, who finds it "bizarre" that anyone is still pursuing this case. And who also, by the by, failed to disclose the tiny, inconsequential detail that her husband, Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski, is actively pressuring U.S. authorities to drop the case.

There is also evidence that Polanski raped a child. There is evidence that the victim did not consent, regardless of her age. There is evidence -- albeit purely anecdotal, in this case -- that only the most debased crapweasel thinks "I didn't know she was 13!" is a reasonable excuse for raping a child, much less continuing to rape her after she's said no repeatedly. There is evidence that the California justice system does not hold that "notoriety, lawyers' fees and professional stigma" are an appropriate sentence for child rape.

But hey, he wasn't allowed to pick up his Oscar in person! For the love of all that's holy, hasn't the man suffered enough?

Granted, Roman Polanski has indeed suffered a great deal in his life, which is where Applebaum takes her line of argument next:

Surviving the Holocaust certainly could lead to an "understandable fear of irrational punishment," but being sentenced for pleading guilty to child rape is basically the definition of rational punishment. Applebaum then points out that Polanski was a suspect in the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, a crime actually committed by the Manson family -- but again, that was the unfortunate consequence of a perfectly rational justice system. Most murdered pregnant women were killed by husbands or boyfriends, so that suspicion was neither personal nor unwarranted. This isn't Kafkaesque stuff.

But what of the now-45-year-old victim, who received a settlement from Polanski in a civil case, saying she'd like to see the charges dropped? Shouldn't we be honoring her wishes above all else?

In a word, no. At least, not entirely. I happen to believe we should honor her desire not to be the subject of a media circus, which is why I haven't named her here, even though she chose to make her identity public long ago. But as for dropping the charges, Fecke said it quite well: "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."

It works on behalf of the people, in fact -- the people whose laws in every state make it clear that both child rape and fleeing prosecution are serious crimes. The point is not to keep 76-year-old Polanski off the streets or help his victim feel safe. The point is that drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not -- and at least in theory, does not -- tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are, no matter how old you were when you finally got caught, no matter what your victim says about it now, no matter how mature she looked at 13, no matter how pushy her mother was, and no matter how many really swell movies you've made.

Roman Polanski raped a child. No one, not even him, disputes that. Regardless of whatever legal misconduct might have gone on during his trial, the man admitted to unlawful sex with a minor. But the Polanski apologism we're seeing now has been heating up since "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," the 2008 documentary about Polanski's fight to get the conviction dismissed. Writing in Salon, Bill Wyman criticized the documentary's whitewashing of Polanksi's crimes last February, after Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if the director wanted to challenge the conviction, he'd need to turn himself in to U.S. authorities and let the justice system sort it out. "Fugitives don't get to dictate the terms of their case ... Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated, of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed."

The reporting on Polanski's arrest has been every bit as "bizarrely skewed," if not more so. Roman Polanski may be a great director, an old man, a husband, a father, a friend to many powerful people, and even the target of some questionable legal shenanigans. He may very well be no threat to society at this point. He may even be a good person on balance, whatever that means. But none of that changes the basic, undisputed fact: Roman Polanski raped a child. And rushing past that point to focus on the reasons why we should forgive him, pity him, respect him, admire him, support him, whatever, is absolutely twisted.

A key revelation, Ms. Zenovich said, came from the case's retired prosecutor, Roger Gunson, who suggests in the film that Judge Rittenband acted improperly before Mr. Polanski decided to skip the country in 1978. At first all sides had agreed that the only sentence he should serve would be a 90-day psychiatric evaluation in prison at Chino, Calif. But when Chino authorities, fearing for Mr. Polanski's safety, released him after 42 days, an infuriated Judge Rittenband called in both sets of lawyers and announced a new plan.


and I keep circling back to my comment that "I find it VERY strange that no one filed charges against the judge" ~

They did.

Mr. Polanski's defense submitted an affidavit charging Judge Rittenband with bias, prejudice and unprofessional conduct, and Judge Rittenband ultimately agreed to allow another judge to handle the case

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbc ... e=printart

Their testimony nails Rittenband as a shameless publicity seeker who was more concerned with his own image than arriving at justice. Who broke his word to attorneys on both sides. Who staged a fake courtroom session in which Gunson and Geimer were to go through the motions of making their arguments before the judge read an opinion he had already prepared. Who tried to stage such a "sham" (Gunson's term) a second time. Who juggled possible sentences in discussions with outsiders, once calling a Santa Monica reporter, David L. Jonta, into his chambers to ask him, "What the hell should I do with Polanski?" Who discussed the case with the guy at the next urinal at his country club. Who held a press conference while the case was still alive. Who was removed from the case on a motion by both prosecution and defense.

Whitewashing Roman Polanski

By Bill Wyman

Feb. 19, 2009 |

Bad art is supposed to be harmless, but the 2008 film "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired," about the notorious child-sex case against the fugitive director, has become an absolute menace. For months, lawyers for the filmmaker have been maneuvering to get the Los Angeles courts to dismiss Polanski's 1978 conviction, based on supposed judicial misconduct uncovered in the documentary. On Tuesday, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza ruled that if Polanski, who fled on the eve of his sentencing, in March 1978, wanted to challenge his conviction, he could -- by coming back and turning himself in.

Espinoza was stating the obvious: Fugitives don't get to dictate the terms of their case. Polanski, who had pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, was welcome to return to America, surrender, and then petition the court as he wished. Indeed, the judge even gave Polanski more than he deserved, saying that he might actually have a case. "There was substantial, it seems to me, misconduct during the pendency of this case," he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. "Other than that, he just needs to submit to the jurisdiction of the court."

Polanski deserves to have any potential legal folderol investigated, of course. But the fact that Espinoza had to state the obvious is testimony to the ways in which the documentary, and much of the media coverage the director has received in recent months, are bizarrely skewed. The film, which has inexplicably gotten all sorts of praise, whitewashes what Polanski did in blatant and subtle fashion -- and recent coverage of the case, in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and elsewhere, has in turn accepted the film's contentions at face value.

For now, the Los Angeles judge has injected a dose of reality into the debate. But "Wanted and Desired" seems to have inserted into the public consciousness the idea that Polanski, an irrepressible European, had been naughty during a colorful time, and that he has been toyed with by a monstrous legal system. Creepy and disturbing, the film does show us a few of the director's moral warts. But it leaves the strong impression that Polanski was a wronged man, jerked around by a cartoony, publicity-hungry judge to the point where fleeing was his only viable option.

"Wanted and Desired" is directed by Marina Zenovich. Previously she had made well-received documentaries about the Sundance Film Festival and France's charismatic Bernard Tapie, who owned a chain of health stores and sponsored a famous cycling team, which included Tour de France winner Greg LeMond. Tapie later got into trouble with the law for fixing soccer games, and after spending time in prison, became an actor.

In "Wanted and Desired," Zenovich casts Polanski, whose face repeatedly fills the screen with a Byronic luminosity, as a tragic figure, a child survivor of the Holocaust haunted by the murder of his wife, the actress Sharon Tate, at the hands of the Manson family. His friends are uniformly supportive: "This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" one exclaims.

As for the judge, Laurence J. Rittenband, why, he's a risible self-promoter. If Polanski is Byron, the judge is an Oliver Hardy or a Billy Gilbert, all but twiddling his tie in a series of ever-more-comical photographs. He actually kept a scrapbook about the celebrities who came through his Santa Monica courtroom. He had two girlfriends.

Now, that's one way to portray those two men -- and one that Polanski's current lawyers would prefer. But there's another way, too: You could show one as a child-sex predator who drugged a 13-year-old girl with quaaludes and champagne; lured her to pose for naked photographs; ignoring her protests, had sex with her; and then anally raped her.

The other could be cast as a canny jurist -- possibly a brilliant one, smart enough to have gone from high school directly to Harvard Law and graduated so young he wasn't allowed to take the bar exam -- who may have gone too far in his intent to block off the legal escape hatches celebrity wrongdoers use.

The truth is somewhere in between, but it's probably a lot closer to the second version. Yet that initial stark contrast -- the tragic hero, the goofy jurist -- permeates the film. Documentarians should have a wide leeway to argue their case the way they want, but there's a point at which ethical lines are crossed. Zenovich, like many other chroniclers to the stars, seems to have been blinded by her contact with Polanski.

Here's an example: The word "sodomy" is briefly referenced in Zenovich's documentary, but it's a somewhat ambiguous term, and it's never explained. Zenovich has fun flashing bits of the victim's grand jury testimony on the screen, but she never gets around to using this exchange from that testimony, which was made public in 2003 and published by the Smoking Gun:

In the girl's grand jury testimony, which is slightly sickening to read, she also said that she had repeatedly told Polanski no, but that she was too afraid of him to resist.

It's a drag to include a scene of anal rape of a 13-year-old in your moody documentary about such a Byronic figure, but it's also fairly relevant.

At the same time, Zenovich doesn't have time to tell us about the exceptional back story of Rittenband. In other words, she withholds the most damaging bit of information about Polanski from her viewers, and the most favorable bit of information about the judge.

Zenovich seems to have a tin ear when it comes to sexual politics, too. The film spends a lot of time telling us that Rittenband apparently had two girlfriends, using some goofy graphics to underscore the point. Zenovich doesn't say the judge was married, so it's not clear exactly why this information is relevant. But given what Polanski is accused of, the irony seems to be that the judge was a womanizer, too.

But Polanski, of course, wasn't on trial for womanizing. He was on trial for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. The director's ear, here as elsewhere, seems a bit … continental when it comes to such issues.

In "Wanted and Desired," it's weird how detached Zenovich stays from the victim, and how she undermines her in subtle ways. The tone is set early on, when a friend of Polanski's tells of being woken up and informed that the director had been arrested. The moment is actually played for laughs, with interspersed shots of a worried Mia Farrow using the phone in a scene from "Rosemary's Baby."

A filmmaker attuned to the psychological undercurrents of the characters in her drama might have been conscious of the state of a 13-year-old girl, who had just been drugged and raped and had spent the next period of time at a police station reliving the incident; and shaken by the story of "Rosemary's Baby" -- that, too, about a horrifically abused woman.

But the scene isn't used to illustrate the victim's story -- it's about poor Roman. He's the person making the desperate phone call. It's an odd juxtaposition when you think about it. That's when the friend, having just been told Polanski has been arrested, says, "This is somebody who could not be a rapist!" Here again, Zenovich is playing with semantics. It's obvious the friend was saying he couldn't imagine Polanski, say, following a woman down the street and grabbing her in an alley.

If Zenovich wasn't tipping the scales in Polanski's favor, she could have asked the guy, "Well, what about statutory rape, having sex with an underage girl? Could you imagine him doing that?"

We also hear people note, meaningfully, that meeting someone like Polanski could help a potential young actress's career. Such a remark about a grown woman would be slightly offensive; about a 13-year-old it's exceedingly so. The girl told police at the time she had repeatedly told Polanski no; on the screen Zenovich runs a line to that effect from the girl's grand jury testimony, but immediately follows it with a quote from Polanski's: "She was not unresponsive." This creates a subtle he-said-she-said dynamic that, in a case in which consent isn't a issue, represents another bit of moral prestidigitation.

It's strange to see a female filmmaker anchor her documentary's arguments with such atavistic attitudes. It gets worse: In the media circus of the time, some of the European press reported that the victim hadn't been a virgin. We then get to watch as Polanski's attorney, Douglas Dalton, stands in front of a gaggle of media, Polanski nodding by his side, to say, "The facts indicate that before the alleged acts in this case the girl had engaged in sexual activity. We want to know about it, we want to know who was involved, when, we want to know why these other people were not prosecuted. It's something we want to fully develop."

A more feminist-minded director might have used her interviews with Dalton to explore some of the Neanderthal ways he was prepared to wage the case, had the director gone to trial. But, of course, the director didn't go to trial. As the film shows, Polanski accepted a plea bargain and pleaded guilty to the formal felony charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor; he and his lawyer knew he could face prison time. Polanski also stood in front of the judge and admitted what he did and that he'd known what he was doing.

In the wake of that, Rittenband was trying to figure out how to make sure Polanski was punished; he was apparently concerned that the director would act contrite, get a short prison term and then assemble a pack of legal wolves to get him out of trouble. And the film makes a decent case that Rittenband ultimately went off the rails.

But even this isn't exactly a revelation; Rittenband got in trouble for his actions at the time, and was ultimately removed from the case. But by that time the director had already fled, which lost him whatever legal high ground he might have obtained.

Flash forward 30 years, and Polanski has to try to make that very old issue seem new. His lawyers are also basing their case for dismissal on two other, lesser issues. Rittenband, who Polanski has said was playing with him like a mouse, was actually nice enough to the director after the guilty plea to let him go to Europe to make a movie, an option the L.A. courts system, one suspects, affords few other accused child rapists, then or now. While there, he had the misfortune to be photographed carousing at an Oktoberfest in Munich. One of the district attorneys in the documentary says he called the judge's attention to the photo and suggested that Polanski was making a fool out of him.

(This photo, which Zenovich attacks with the zeal of a Kennedy assassination conspiracist examining the Zapruder film, is exhaustively analyzed, with multiple interviewees testifying in all sorts of ways that Polanski really wasn't having fun -- an assertion the victim was never allowed to make unchallenged about her photographic experience with Polanski.)

Polanski's lawyers have tried to paint what the D.A. said as an example of an inappropriate communication, but the D.A. mentions it openly in the documentary (it's not a "revelation") and has said it was no big deal.

Finally, the lawyers are incensed that the L.A. court responded to a press inquiry by saying Polanski had to surrender before anything was going to happen with his case. Polanski's lawyers say this was "ruling publicly" on a matter before the court. It could be that. It could also be called "stating the obvious" -- which is what Judge Espinoza did Tuesday.

The coverage of Polanski's legal maneuverings in the last year took its cues from Zenovich's documentary. The charges against Polanski were often vaguely described; though the charge of sodomy was in the original case, and the Smoking Gun posted the girl's wrenching grand jury testimony in 2003, these issues were almost never mentioned.

The New York Times finally did a detailed story on the charges last month. But the story still concentrated on supposed "troubling" and "uncomfortable" issues raised by the film. Just listen to this portentous passage: "For the elder Mr. Dalton, who urged Mr. Polanski to pursue redress after reviewing the documentary, however, the issue turned from the original crime to questions about the way authorities here handled it."

Dalton was given a lot of time in the documentary to spin wildly for his client, so it's hardly surprising that he managed to convince himself that he was correct after seeing it -- or that, given the fairly incontrovertible facts of the case, that he would like to turn the issue just about anywhere other than "the original crime."

Polanski has had a wrenching life, of course, but it is overplayed in "Wanted and Desired." I think it's true to say that there are many people who survived the Holocaust who don't drug and rape children, for example. More apposite and logical questions, in turn, aren't explored. For example: Polanski was photographing the girl for a photo spread for a European edition of Vogue. Someone could have asked him, or his lawyer -- just for the record -- if he had drugged and raped any other of his photo subjects.

The girl in the case is now in her 40s; she has said the case is behind her and that she has forgiven Polanski. (The documentary waits until the end to note that this came only after she settled a civil case against the director.) But the issue here isn't Polanski being left alone; he's the one trying to get his case dismissed.

The movie tries to drum up sympathy for Polanski by playing up the media firestorm he was at the center of; but that's Polanski's fault, too. (Before they rape children, celebrities should consider how the media attention sure to result will have adverse consequences for their victims, as well as themselves.) Celebrities complain about "the dishonesty of the media," as Polanski does repeatedly in the film, only when the dishonesty doesn't suit them. If the coverage helps you -- a portrayal as devoted husband, say -- then it's fine, true or not. But when it doesn't, they scream.

But that's just the Polanski team's legal strategy: keeping as many balls in the air as possible to make it seem as if the director has something to negotiate with, which he hasn't. Around the time of the documentary's release, they actually cut a deal to settle the case -- but balked at the prospect of cameras in the court. This too was an irony, considering that Roman Polanski got himself into trouble with a camera so many years ago. Thirty years later, the director was still trying to call the shots.

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2009/02/19/roman_polanski_documentary/print.html

She said no and it was anal penetration. Any more doubt about it being rape or being brutal? I agree with Susanne, someone should have ensured his demise.

We need to remember, too, when we hear of the victim and what she says now. This isn't about justice for the 44 year old woman. It's about justice for the 13 year old girl.

Knowing the details, this case is a lot more cut and dry, for me. She was raped, because she did not consent. No means no. Period.

There are other details. As a minor, she was manipulated and plied with drugs and alcohol. She not only did not consent, she actively dissented at every stage of the encounter. For me, anyway, these details are a lot more important than her age. From a moral perspective, anyway. But the law is the law, and i don't judge the prosecutors for trying the case they thought they could win, with the least damage to the victim's psyche.

I'm not trying to negate anything. People are let out of jail early all the time, and for various reasons-"good behavior" can even get a murderer out early! That doesn't mean it's Ok with me. But it is legal. Legal and moral aren't the same thing. As far as I'm concerned RP should have been jailed on the spot day one and kept there until the trial was over, but I'm no judge. ( Good thing, I guess.)

RP was given the 90 day "psych. eval." because the judge was pissed off after seeing a photo, even though he hadn't issued any kind of "house arrest" or limitations on what RP could or could not do while he was overseas. If the psych eval was so important and related to the original charges, ( to decide if RP was a danger to others) why didn't it take place immediately, instead of after letting RP travel out of the country? Why wouldn't it have been done *before* any plea deal? How does that make any sense?

Then Judge R was pissed off that Chino let RP out early. How could they-legally-let him out early if 90 days incarceration was *mandated*?

Judges aren't supposed to judge based on whatever pisses them off or bruises their ego on a given day, and in a nutshell ( pun intended) that's what happened. RP should have turned himself in after Rittenband was removed from the case. IMO he made it worse by staying away after that judge was removed.

I think they should declare a mistrail on the original court case based on the misconduct (which was proven), and start fresh.