Roman Polanski: 'I Can Remain Silent No Longer!'

Leftist Hollywood’s favorite child rapist has pretty much come to the end of his appeals process. Having lost most every court ruling including the option of being sentenced in absentia, the 76 year old sex offender is facing almost certain extradition to Los Angeles. Desperate and running out of legal room to run, over the weekend, in a not-so-surprising fit of narcissism and rationalization, Polanski spoke out in an online magazine run by his friend and chief apologist, French philosopher and frequent HuffPo contributor Bernard-Henri Levy. Naturally the man who drugged and sodomized a 13 year old girl, fled the country, and has since enjoyed thirty-plus years of a lavish celebrity lifestyle, plays the victim; even as he luxuriates under house arrest in a $4 million Swiss villa.

The title of Polanski’s statement is, “I can remain silent no longer!” (you gotta love that exclamation point), and the biggest surprise is that the director appears to blame the 2008 documentary, “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired” for stirring up his recent troubles:

This affair was roused from its slumbers of over three decades by a documentary film-maker who gathered evidence from persons involved at the time. I took no part in that project, either directly or indirectly.

Polanski’s’ probably correct about this. Prior to the film’s release, Polanski’s crimes were largely forgotten; a caveat tossed into any news story covering his latest film project. The obvious goal of the documentary was to burnish the Oscar-winner’s legacy and paint him as some poor, misunderstood artiste persecuted by the American legal system. That it’s had the complete opposite effect and poked a dormant hornet’s nest that was subsequently thrown right in the middle of Polanski’s comfortable old age is a very rich irony to be forever savored by those of us who believe child sodomizers shouldn’t be allowed to flee justice.

The rest of the aging pedophile’s piece reads pretty much like this:

“I can no longer remain silent because the United States continues to demand my extradition more to serve me on a platter to the media of the world than to pronounce a judgment concerning which an agreement was reached 33 years ago.”

In Polanski’s self-entitled mind no one working to bring him to justice is driven by the cause of justice. He’s merely the victim of past and present opportunists using him for mercenary purposes. Polanski goes so far as to accuse the Los Angeles District Attorney of pursuing him to gin up favorable media publicity.

I can remain silent no longer because the same causes are now producing the same effects. The new District Attorney, who is handling this case and has requested my extradition, is himself campaigning for election and needs media publicity!

What’s most startling about Polanski’s statement is that he doesn’t even attempt to fake a sense of remorse; not for fleeing justice, not for anally raping a thirteen year-old girl. He does mention his victim, however, but only to bolster his case for a Get Out Of Jail Free Card:

I can remain silent no longer because the California court has dismissed the victim’s numerous requests that proceedings against me be dropped, once and for all, to spare her from further harassment every time this affair is raised once more.

What Polanski (and his supporters) refuse to address is his breaking of the law when he fled the country. This violation is completely separate from the rape case. Even if everything the director says about the original case is true, even if he got a rawest of deals from a publicity-crazed judge three decades ago, fleeing the country and lambing it in Europe is not a lawful remedy.

I ask only to be treated fairly like anyone else.

Well, everyone else who pleads guilty to a sex crime and then feels betrayed by the American legal system has to sit in prison as their appeal process works its way through the system. Everyone else doesn’t flee to Europe to enjoy the pampered lifestyle of a millionaire filmmaker as the toast of Hollywood comes to him.

If Polanski and his supporters want him to be treated like everyone else, he’ll come back to Los Angeles and take his grievance through the same legal process everyone else does. But I guess his Leftist supporters believe in a two-tiered legal system…

One for the poor and middle class, one for the elite who direct films they enjoy.