Roman Polanski's Arrest Is His Own Fault

Why did American prosecutors decide to go after Roman Polanski last weekend, more than 30 years after the Oscar-winning director fled the United States before his sentencing for the 1977 rape of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey? The timing of his arrest in Switzerland on Sunday might seem arbitrary, since Polanski has been traveling between his main residence in Paris and his chalet in Gstaad for years without incident. But the chronology is not random, and it has everything to do with Polanski’s celebrity status—and perhaps with the hubris that goes along with it.

Society has special rules for the famous. For many years, that apparently helped to shield Polanski from prosecution. Salon’s Kate Harding argues that the only reason [2] Polanski was allowed to roam free in Europe for three decades, making award-winning films and vacationing at ski chalets, was because the normal legal rules didn’t apply to him. But they should have. “Drugging and raping a child, then leaving the country before you can be sentenced for it, is behavior our society should not—and at least in theory, does not tolerate, no matter how famous, wealthy or well-connected you are,” she writes.

Other celebrities have seemed similarly exempt. In 1988, Rob Lowe videotaped himself having sex with a 16-year-old girl during the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. According to the O.C. Register [3], the mother of the girl filed a civil suit, but criminal charges were never pursued.

The Hollywood producer Dino DeLaurentis and “half a dozen other cigar-smoking moguls” told Lowe that he “would make it through this seamy dark night of the soul,” according to Entertainment Weekly. They pointed to the precedent set by Errol Flynn. The swashbuckling actor was tried and acquitted for two statutory rapes in 1942 even though “it was never seriously in doubt that he had had sex with Betty Hansen and Peggy Satterlee, both underage,” as EW put it. According to Leo Braudy, a professor at USC and the author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History [4], statutory rape “wasn’t seen as a problem” at the time of Flynn’s trial. And so the trial and acquittal “actually enhanced Flynn’s reputation.

Polanski’s crime is more polarizing than Flynn’s and Lowe’s for a few reasons. The first is that while Polanski said the sex was consensual (admitting to statutory rape), Gailey says it was not. In her grand jury testimony [5] about how Polanski vaginally and anally raped her, Gailey sounds disturbingly young—she refers to oral sex as “cuddliness.”

Also bad for Polanski: He was never seen as a lighthearted, suave cad in the tradition of Flynn and Lowe. The career of Fatty Arbuckle, a much less attractive, far darker character, is more instructive. The New York Times describes Arbuckle’s early screen presence [6] as “A leering country bumpkin with barnyard manners and a libido to match.” When he was accused of raping and murdering 28-year-old actress Virginia Rappe, he confirmed his public’s worst expectations, and he was banned from the movie business for several years, even though his name was eventually cleared. As Braudy points out, Polanski is an object of fascination because of the link between his artistic output—movies like Rosemary’s Baby [7] and Repulsion [8]—and his morbid past. His wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered by the Manson Family in 1969 when she was eight months pregnant, and his mother died in the Holocaust.

Worst for Polanski, however, is probably the provocation that he himself gave to prosecutors. In 1978, when he was brought to trial, Polanski fled because he believed the judge sentencing him was not going to accept the plea bargain he’d agreed to, a 90-day mental evaluation [9] at Chico State Prison. In 2008, filmmaker Marina Zenovich—who had no prior relationship with Polanski—released a documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired [10], that corroborated Polanski’s fear that his plea bargain wouldn’t have taken effect. Polanski tried to use the information presented in the film to get his case dismissed. Even the prosecutor from the original trial said in the documentary that he didn’t think the judge, who is now dead, had been fair to Polanski.

And for a while, it seemed as if Polanksi’s strategy might work. Earlier this year, a new judge was willing to consider dismissing the case against him. But first, he wanted Polanski to show up [11] in court. Polanski, however, would not appear.

This is Polanski’s biggest problem: The judge’s terms were reasonable. He gave Polanski three months to surface in L.A. and even hinted that the director would probably not serve jail time if he appeared. And yet Polanski refused [12]. From the point of view of prosecutors, Polanski practically dared them to act. Gailey, too, has said that she would like to see him come [13] back to deal with the case, though she has publicly forgiven him. “I hope that would mean I'd never have to talk about this again,” she said in 2003 of his return. “Sometimes I feel like we both got a life sentence.”

Polanski’s friends, like Harvey Weinstein [14], refer to the sex he had with Gailey as a “so-called crime” and call on "every U.S. filmmaker to lobby against any move to bring Polanski back to the U.S.” But the more Polanski forces us to think about what he did, the more we may come to see him as a sexual predator who raped a child.