Roman Polanski: A Free Man, but How's His Conscience?

Film director Roman Polanski finally beat the rap, after years of legal wrangling, for drugging a 13-year-old girl then raping her during a modeling shoot in 1977. He remains a fugitive from the United States, but in Switzerland, where he had been under house arrest since last year after receiving a lifetime achievement award at a film festival in Zurich, the government refused to extradite him to the United States so he could be sentenced for his crime. Polanski was probably already jetting his way back to Paris, where he makes his home, when Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf announced that after nine months of deliberation, "Mr. Polanski can now move freely. . . . He's a free man."

This case has gone on so long, triggering bouts of outrage at Polanski and the legal system that let him slip away, along with a sense of resignation, that enough is enough when the girl who was victimized, now middle-aged and long married, has said publicly she doesn't want to revisit the issue, and has urged dismissal of the case. I doubt Polanski's defenders in the film community will be popping champagne over his freedom because the whole affair is sleazy, from the forced sex to the sloppy police work. I also don't think his critics will get too worked up. Yes, it was a crime, and the girl was exploited. Her mother delivered her to Polanski, trying to get her in the movies, and apparently there was a deal of some sort struck between the adults that they then reneged on -- but who knows after all these years -- and when the woman who suffered the abuse and the unwanted publicity wants to turn away from the whole sordid episode, I can respect that.

Polanski was initially indicted on six felony counts, including child molesting and drug-induced rape. He pleaded guilty to a single count of unlawful sexual intercourse, and was sentenced to prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation, an exceedingly light sentence. At the 42-day mark, he was released on the grounds that he was of sound mind and unlikely to offend again, but when a judge said he planned to return him to jail to complete the sentence, then ask him to agree to voluntary deportation, Polanski fled the country, condemning himself to a life on the run, when another six weeks of incarceration would have repaid his debt to society, which was all the culture demanded at the time.

In the intervening decades, the rise of feminism and a greater awareness of sex trafficking and the exploitation of young girls have made Polanski's crime loom larger and more horrific in the public consciousness. Yet it is questions over his time served then, a judge who had perhaps unwittingly tipped his hand, and the dodgy way Polanski was in then out of jail that provided the grist for his lawyers to contend that Polanski was being unfairly hounded. It was an argument that the Swiss embraced, saying that releasing Polanski was not about deciding his guilt or innocence, but about accepting his lawyer's contention that he had fulfilled his sentence after undergoing the psychiatric evaluation as ordered by the Los Angeles court.

Whether he did or didn't serve out that very light sentence, Polanski instead got 30 years of what I would like to believe had a good share of remorse and guilt. If I were imposing a sentence, I'd get Polanski to underwrite some community service project -- maybe a halfway house in LA for sex offenders, or some sort of juvenile justice program for runaways and girls who want to become famous in Hollywood and run afoul of men who should know better, and their mothers too. Tapping into Polanski's fortune would be a lot more satisfying than spending taxpayer dollars in a futile fight with lawyers and European governments.