Generous America, Scary America

Nobody is defending what Roman Polanski did with a 13 year-old girl in Los Angeles over 30 years ago. Nobody.

But this "sinister arrest" of the 76 year-old film director says more about the American obsession with sex than with the rule of law.

The arrest outraged the government of France, which has declined to extradite Polanski since he fled the United States in 1978, after a Los Angeles judge signaled he would scotch a plea agreement in the sex case. In France, Polanski is revered both as a filmmaker and as a martyr to American injustice and puritanism.

Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand issued a statement saying he "profoundly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already known so many during his life."

Mitterrand also charged that Polanski was "thrown to the lions," the Associated Press reported. "In the same way that there is a generous America that we like, there is also a scary America that has just shown its face," he said.

The victim of Polanski's sexual advances, Samantha Geimer, is now 45 years old with a family, and has been trying to put this ordeal behind her for years.

"I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr. Polanski may have caused me as a child," she said at the time. "I got over it a long time ago." Geimer said Polanski had paid, and she wanted to move on and stop reliving the details of the assault every time he made headlines.

"True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother," she said.

In 1997 Geimer is quoted as saying, "He did something really gross to me, but it was the media that ruined my life." Now the US judicial system wants to ruin her life all over again.

The details of this case are well known to most, from Polanski's escape from Nazi Germany as a child, his mother's death in a concentration camp, the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family, to the publicity hungry judge who wanted to send Polanski a "stern message", forcing him to skip bail and leave the United States behind. This is a tragedy that keeps on compounding itself behind the blind and relentless search for justice at any cost to all involved.

The only real justice will be if Polanski appears in an American court, and the charges are dismissed as per the request of Samantha Geimer. Enough is enough.