In 1977, Oscar-winning Film director Roman Polanski (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Pianist”) raped a 13-year-old girl. He fled the United States when he got found out, and he recently filed a request to the US courts asking them not to send him to prison if he comes back to America. He wants them to drop the rape charges against him and live and let live and invite him back to the country, which they obviously denied, and he’s compared them to “the Germans who invaded Poland.”
Polanski’s filing asked the court to let “this 40-year-old criminal case” go.
Not being funny, though, a Rape is a rape, no matter how long ago it happened. Polanski has the cheek to say that pursuing him for a rape he committed against a child is “morally incoherent, legally illogical, and factually deceptive.” The director’s lawyer Harland Braun made the filing.
Polanski ‘openly stands in contempt of a legal order’
Polanski is desperate to avoid jail time for his crimes. He claims he “openly stands in contempt of a legal order,” which is nice and everything, but a lot of people openly stand in contempt of molesting children. According to the filing (which is a whopping 13 pages in length), Polanski has been told by the court that he is “not entitled to request” them to speak to the District Attorney to try and convince her to change her mind about wanting to put a man who raped a child and faced no repercussions in jail (good luck with that).
At this point, Polanski might as well give up on his dreams of returning to America. He’s 83 years old, so he’ll probably be dead soon, and the US courts are gunning to get him in jail before then so he can pay for his crimes. They’ve been after him ever since he fled the country on a flight out of LAX in 1978 when his rape started coming to light.
Polanski’s request also had the audacity to call out the LA court that convicted him for “breaking its promise” after “making one promise to Mr. Polanski” that if he were to step back on US soil, he would not face any time behind bars, and he claims this goes against the court’s “basic judicial obligations.”
This ‘one promise’ is that there would only be 90 days jail time
The “one promise to Mr.
Polanski” that Braun often refers to, in effect trying to distract juries and public opinion from the fact the director of “Chinatown” raped a teenager and focusing more on how a court changed its mind at some point over the past forty years (how dare they!), is that apparently in the late 1970s when the rape and its ensuing conviction took place, the court promised Polanski he would only receive a sentence of 90 days in prison to pay for his crime. Seems a little short, doesn’t it? Judge Laurence Rittenband also thought so, and changed his mind from 90 days to a whopping 50 years (!), which obviously isn’t going to happen now because he’s 83 and won’t come back to the US until he’s guaranteed no jail time, but anyway, that’s where we’re at.