In yesterday’s blog post The Troubling Case of Roman Polanski, Steven W. Beattie called Roman Polanski “criminally, if not morally culpable” for drugging and sodomizing a 13-year-old girl. Then he asked other writers to empathize, not with his victim, but with Polanski himself.
Let’s be clear. This is not only a case of unlawful sex. This is about a particular category of unlawful sex: rape. The rape was pled down to unlawful sex with a minor in court, which is not unusual, but we cannot plead down reality, as Beattie seems willing to do.
The most offensive portion of Beattie’s defense of Polanski is his preoccupation with whether Polanski’s 13-year-old victim was a child. Beattie says she was not, in disagreement with Kate Harding, the Merriam-Webster dictionary, and the American legal system. A 13-year-old is not an adult, and to argue otherwise in order to make Polanski’s crime understandable goes beyond empathy and into justification.
