It’s a strange business, all told. For Roman Polanski, exiled from the US and making – until 2004's Oscar-winning The Pianist – decidedly sub-par films for the past thirty-two years, the burden of his past has remained curiously obscure. Friends ask, “What are you writing about?”
“The, um, the whole Roman Polanski thing”, I reply. At which point there's a slight lift of eyebrow, and a brief “Oh” of recognition. This is followed either by the usual change of subject or an enquiry as to “what you think about it”. At which point I think of the details, in all their knottiness, and give a non-committal “Hmm” rather than risk surprising – or worse, boring – my interlocutor. We all, it seems, know what “the Roman Polanski thing” is, until asked to talk specifics. As for what we think of it: everyone seems to have an opinion.
Shortly after his arrest on 26 September last year, in Zurich, where he had arrived to accept a lifetime achievement award from the city's film festival, figures from every part of the media called for his release, commended the Swiss authorities for giving him his comeuppance, or reflected with amusement on how his films – with their themes of sexual brutality and obsession, most notably the Satanic rape-drama Rosemary’s Baby (1968) – had allegedly presaged his downfall. Most prominent on the media agenda was a petition demanding that he be given his liberty, written by the French philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy and signed by, among others, Paul Auster, Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Mike Nichols and Neil Jordan. It outlined the themes Polanski's defenders would continually return to: his respectability, public standing, and his body of work as “an ingenious film-maker”; his unfortunate history as a Polish survivor of the Holocaust and Stalinism; the distance in time from the original infraction for which he'd been apprehended.
Moreover, they suggested that the original conviction was essentially immaterial: the case was, as the petition put it, “a politico-legal imbroglio”, and nothing else. After all, they pointed out, the plaintiff, Samantha Gailey (née Geimer), publicly stated that she didn't want to see his sentence enforced, that she wanted to “put the case behind her”. Whoopi Goldberg, speaking up for Polanski, supplied perhaps the best quote of the whole debacle: “It wasn't rape-rape.” Who then, his defenders ask, has been violated? Now, can we please stop with the handwringing and get back to normal?
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One absorbed so much contradictory opinion in the days after Polanski's arrest that to make up one's mind seemed not only unfeasible, but unconscionable. Everyone in the case was damaged: Samantha Geimer, at the centre of a high-profile rape case at thirteen, had her person and dignity violated, and her showbusiness ambitions ruined; if Polanski was imprisoned (his original sentence extended for skipping bail in 1978 and fleeing for Paris), it would almost certainly be the end of his career. You heard what seemed reasonable grounds for non-prosecution, mitigating circumstances: one, mentioned by the Los Angeles Times' Patrick Goldstein, was the lack of public interest vested in the case – the pursuit of an ageing film-maker for a thirty-year-old crime by the LA County District Attorney's office, at the taxpayer's expense and “at a time when California is shredding the safety net that protects the poor and the unemployed, not to mention the budget of the public school system”, seemed especially petty. Then there was the infamous sex-and-drugs culture of Hollywood in the 60s and 70s: the case was almost parodically typical of “the sort of thing people do in LA”, down to the details of the champagne and Quaalude that Polanski gave Geimer, and the hot-tub, in Jack Nicholson's house of all places, where the offence occurred. These sorts of things, you heard, happened all the time, and people, shielded from the LAPD by the invisible privilege of Hollywood, weren't prosecuted for it. Polanski had already experienced 'Hollywood Babylon' at its sourest, in the death of his wife, Sharon Tate, in the Manson murders of 1969. Perhaps most egregious of all, it was, one heard, a publicity stunt: given the frequency of sex-crime convictions for those who are not internationally famous film-makers, the zeal with which the Swiss and Californian authorities went after Polanski smacked of example-making, of prosecution for the sake of it.
Goldberg’s insistence that Polanski’s act was “not rape-rape” is worth re-examining, and not just for its unintentional hilarity. A number of online and newspaper commentators got into something of a froth over it, suggesting that she was diminishing the seriousness of what he had done. She meant, correctly, that the conviction hanging over Polanski's head was not for statutory rape, but for “unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor”. But in a sense those who raised their voices against Goldberg hit on the unconscious point of his apologists' arguments. They all admitted – Polanski included, having entered a negotiated guilty plea at the original trial – that yes, he'd had oral, vaginal and anal sex with a thirteen-year-old girl against her will – she had, she testified to the grand jury, shouted “No” – but that it didn't really matter.
The question of selectivity is a curious one. The same reasons his defenders gave for his release – his public profile as a film-maker – were apparently the same as the police and courts' for putting pressure on his case: it was impossible for him to publicly and legally run away from a past misdeed so well-known. In Against Our Will, her historical and social study of rape, published in 1975, two years before Polanski’s misdeed, Susan Brownmiller breaks down the statistics on rape convictions, and describes in stark detail the judicial culture surrounding it at the time. Polanski was, if not exceptional, not part of the largest percentile when it came to the characteristics of rape: most incidents occurred in the lower economic strata of society, victims tended to be of the same social class as their attacker (Geimer, while white and middle-class, wasn’t part of Hollywood’s film-aristocracy), and in fifty-three percent of cases the attacker was a total stranger to the victim. It was also the case that the vast majority of reported rapes did not reach conviction: in studies it was found probably half of all rape complaints were declared “unfounded” by the police; in New York City in 1971, less than ten percent of rape arrests resulted in going before the grand jury, and less than a fifth of these resulted in trial and conviction. The notorious difficulty faced by women suffering rape meant that “four out of five rapes go unreported”. Polanski’s conviction – and, perhaps, his singling-out for enforced conviction – was not evidence of some legal persecutory complex, but an indictment of a justice system essentially at one with the men who commit rape. And it’s a testament to the collective lack of imagination among Polanski’s defenders that they were unable to square his directing abilities with the fact of his being a simple brute.
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What was most curious about the Henri-Lévy petition was not the fact that its signatories were well-heeled liberals, who would normally be expected to look unkindly on rape (such types look after their own), but that they included a number of women – the French actresses Isabelle Adjani, Isabelle Huppert and Arielle Dombasle, French film-maker Danièle Thompson, Belgian fashion-designer Diane von Furstenberg. The business of women – well-educated and modern, bohemian women at that – putting out apologias for rape would have been ironically amusing if it weren’t so abjectly depressing. Edging the complaints aired in the petition was the suggestion that behind the authorities' actions was the need to kowtow to 'political correctness' on the issue of sexual violence – it was the fault of those meddling feminists again.
The generation of Huppert, et al were the first to be affected by the political and social achievements of the American and European women’s movement: their ability to pursue their creative careers, to determine the course of their own lives, were won through years of collective action – action that, amongst other objectives, sought to remake the world into one in which rape would be understood and treated as what it was: a criminal violation of another person's being. Not, of course, that the law and the allegedly civilised didn’t pay lip service to this notion beforehand: as Brownmiller noted, there had been certainly enough tales of female martyrdom involving rape. In the real world this wasn't how it played out. The Californian police manual of the time confidently stated that “[f]orcible rape is one of the most falsely reported crimes. The majority of 'second-day reported' rapes are not legitimate”, while studies undertaken without the intervention of male police-officers found that “only 2 percent of all rape complaints are false – about the same false-report rate that is usual for other kinds of felonies”. Rape trials, in which oath was set against oath, consisted largely of public muck-raking over the 'moral character' of the victim, the law structurally tilted against them.
Brownmiller’s text is studded with excerpts of testimony from rape victims taken at public meetings and conferences held by feminist groups throughout the early 1970s; we find a litany of brush-offs, insults and nonchalant sex-jokes from police-officers – “The cop looked at me and said, 'Aw, who'd want to rape you?'” – and witch-trial assaults in court – “I looked like I was the one on trial”. The result was an official and public silence on rape obscuring the dismal truth of how it was treated, a silence that feminist 'speak-outs' sought to break, airing the reality of rape as experienced by its victims – of legal inaction, of constant, all-enclosing fear, of scars, night-sweats, shattered lives, murder – and the vast extent of the crimes, a silence that was instrumental in perpetuating it. It was for the same reason that, in 1976, Nikki Craft and the Kitty Genovese Women's Group (named after the 28 year-old New Yorker raped and murdered in 1964 while her entire neighbourhood apparently looked on) gained access to and published the name of every man indicted for sex-crimes in Texas since 1960, many of whom had gotten off scot-free to re-offend, and were still in the community. As Seven Days' Jayne Loader reported, “[m]any women saw the names of their own friends or former lovers... Several found that they had been raped by the same man. One particularly grisly incident stood out: the former lover of one woman was alleged to have raped the 10-year-old daughter of another during a burglary.” By identifying known threats, by excavating fact, they sought to place power back in the hands of women, to adjust a system fundamentally designed to protect rapists; as Craft herself put it, “this society has failed to deal with rape, and women must.” By giving voice to the experience hidden within the opaqueness and silence of statistics, feminists hoped that the Samantha Geimers of this world wouldn't have to live at the mercy of what Brownmiller called “effective agents of terror”.
But that, as Polanski's defenders remind us, was then. There is a story to be told about the assault on feminism under neo-liberal capitalism over the past thirty years that has been told, more capaciously, by others – most effectively by Susan Faludi in her book Backlash, and by Nina Power in One-Dimensional Woman. What we can say is that, protestations of artistic genius aside, the women who defend Roman Polanski are on the side of brutality and crime, and, it would appear, congenitally unable to see where their interests, and where the balance of justice, lies – and that they are not the only ones. According to recent research by the sexual assault referral-centre group Haven, seventy-one percent of women believe a rape-victim should accept partial responsibility if she got into bed with her attacker; thirty-one percent consider her to blame if she wore revealing clothing, while twenty-two percent think the same if she had had numerous sexual partners. This cultural regression to the 1950s has been matched by rape-conviction statistics that would appear to have remained static since that decade. Home Office research in 2007 showed that nearly twenty-three percent of women in the UK had been subject to sexual violence and nearly five percent had been raped; an earlier Home Office report stated that only one-third of rape complaints were considered by the Crown Prosecution Service, with twenty percent making it to court, and six percent ending in convictions. If Polanski is being made an example of, it should be to remind us how far we are from achieving even the demands of thirty years ago – for a world in which women's autonomy is recognised, in which Samantha Geimer's “No” finally means no.
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