Enough.
Anyone who would sign a petition demanding release of a fugitive child rapist is actively hurting a business I love and DOES NOT speak for all of the entertainment industry. America needs to know that by viewing/buying our product, the public is not supporting these views.
Our industry is made up mostly of hard working, decent people who believe in this country and the justice system. I strongly feel that one of the bigger reasons for the decline in film and television is that the public, our customer base, has simply had enough of Hollywood. And I don’t blame them.
I have a question for those supporting Roman Polanski: Is there no line? Is there no line at which you won’t blindly support someone? He’s an artist? So what? Charles Manson was a decent guitar player. Hitler could paint. Roman Polanski is a good director. So-the-hell what? This man drugged and anally raped a thirteen-year-old girl. The transcript of her testimony can be found online. Read it. It should horrify you.
It wasn’t “rape-rape”? What the hell does that even mean, Ms. Goldberg? Are you suggesting that the little girl was at fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time? For not more forcefully resisting an adult her mother placed her with? A famous man?
Or maybe you meant that “statutory rape” isn’t “rape-rape.” Even if you accept the insane notion that a drugged and drunk thirteen-year-old COULD consent to sex with a forty-year-old man, THAT ISN’T WHAT HAPPENED! Read her testimony. Polanski forcibly raped her. She told him “no” repeatedly. When asked why she didn’t fight more, the girl testified, “I was afraid of him.” That sure as hell seems like “rape-rape'” to me.
Is it something else in the view of a self-proclaimed “feminist”?
Another popular justification seems to be, “The victim forgives him.” As a former police officer I can tell you unequivocally that the victim of a crime is often the person least capable of making that decision. They are frightened and humiliated. They just want it all to go away.
Twenty-years or so ago, the Domestic Violence laws were changed in most states requiring police officers to sign complaints instead of asking the abused spouse to do so. Why? Because a lot of them wouldn’t. They were so afraid or so used to the abuse, they didn’t think they could stop it. Jaycee Lee Dugard, the little girl kidnapped by Phillip Garrido, held and raped for eighteen years and forced to give birth to two children in a tent in a backyard (one when she was fourteen), APOLOGIZED to her family. After enduring half a lifetime of abuse, she is the one who feels guilty. Does that mean we let him go?
No. It is a just society’s DUTY to seek justice for them, ESPECIALLY when that victim is a child.
I gratefully added my name to BigHollywood’s petition. Grateful for the chance to tell my customers, the public, that we in Hollywood are not all immoral. We are not all valueless. We are not all possessed by the kind of moral relativism that would excuse raping a child because “Chinatown” was a good film.
Enough.
Edward Allen Bernero, Writer/Director/Executive Producer
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