Roman Polanski, Empathy, and the Road to Moral Relativism

As a small-time journalist who forever struggles to write gripping, effective lead sentences that grab my readers' attention, I have to express my admiration for Kate Harding of Salon.com for what might be the plainest, most direct lead I've ever read: "Roman Polanski raped a child."

Strong stuff, that.

In a week filled with far too many tortuous defenses of the 76-year-old French-Polish director who was recently taken into Swiss custody on a 32-year-old conviction of unlawful sex with a minor, and far too many histrionic diatribes stating the obvious -- that raping a 13-year-old girl is wrong -- Harding managed to cut right to the chase with almost Spartan clarity. But if I may, I'd like to back up a few steps, and look at the Polanski case in a slightly broader context that I've yet to encounter anywhere else.

But first, as a brief refresher for anyone who hasn't already been bombarded by this story, a timeline of events.

In 1977, acclaimed director Roman Polanski reportedly drugged and raped a 13-year-old female model during a photo shoot for Vogue magazine in Los Angeles. Polanski was brought up on six very serious felony charges, but eventually plead guilty to one lesser offense (sex with a minor) in return for a brief stint in a California psychiatric ward, which effectively served as his prison sentence. When Polanski got wind that the judge in the case, possibly at the behest of an uninvolved prosecutor, was planning to vacate the plea bargain and sentence Polanski to hard prison time on the strength of the written confession he had already signed, the director fled the country and took refuge in France. As a man of considerable wealth, Polanski has lived quite comfortably in his French and other European homes ever since, and has continued his directing career.

California prosecutors have made on-and-off attempts to persuade other countries to apprehend Polanski and extradite him to the U.S., but until last week in Zurich, those attempts failed.

Since his arrest last week, a bevy of Hollywood and European filmmakers, actors and artists have rallied to Polanski's defense, even signing a petition demanding his immediate release. Meanwhile, the nature of his past crime has united public opinion elsewhere in a way few controversies could. Liberals and conservatives alike have been near-universal in their condemnation, and their approval that a wealthy man who committed a despicable act three decades ago is finally going to face the consequences that his political and professional allies have shielded him from for so long. Kate Harding is merely the most succinct of his many, many critics.

The outrage is not shocking, but it is the defenses Polanski's allies have proffered that I believe deserve some examination. Most -- such as his advanced age, the artistic quality of his movies, and the fact that he was never accused of a repeat offense after the 1977 incident -- are completely insipid and may be dismissed as such. I hope we do not live in such a debased age that elderly rapists who only victimized one person and made a bunch of cool movies receive a get-out-of-jail free card.

Another defense -- that Polanski's case was so badly mishandled by the justice system that it would be unfair to prosecute him -- holds some merit. The cornerstone of the American legal system is supposed to be that all defendants receive a fair and impartial trial, which Polanski manifestly did not. However, the fact that he unlawfully skipped the country when he believed himself the target of a looming mistrial, instead of fighting the sentence through the established appeals process, considerably undermines this argument.

The defense I find most significant, if not most convincing, was articulated by the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, in his protest of the Polanski arrest, when he said he "strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them." (Side question: Could any country other than France be pompous enough to have a "minister of culture?")

By "ordeals," Mitterand is referring to the undeniable personal tragedies Roman Polanski has suffered. Born in France between the world wars to a partially Jewish family, he lost his mother to a Nazi concentration camp, and only barely escaped from occupied France himself. Two decades later, Polanski's beloved wife, Susan Tate, was brutally murdered by the Manson crime family. She was eight and a half months pregnant at the time.

Mitterand and his fellow Polanski defenders are asking the world, in effect, to empathize with Roman Polanski. He has suffered enough, they say; let go of this 32-year-old crime, which even the victim wishes to move on from, already.

But liberal pundits, many of whom I've disagreed with on prior issues, are having none of this empathy argument. The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson put it thusly:

"In general, I agree with the European view that Americans tend to be prudish and hypocritical about sex. But a grown man drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl? That's not remotely a close call. It's wrong in any moral universe -- and deserves harsher punishment than three decades of gilded exile."

After cataloging the protests of various European artists, whose shrill tone and hyperbole almost defy belief, the liberal New York Times editorialized:

"But hold on a moment. After being indicted in 1977, didn’t Mr. Polanski, now 76, confess to having sex with a 13-year-old girl after plying her with Quaaludes and Champagne? Didn’t he flee the United States when the plea bargaining seemed to fall apart, raising the prospect of prison time? Isn’t there a warrant for his arrest?"

Good for the Post and the Times and other bastions of liberal opinion for such unequivocal insistence on black-and-white justice. I would venture to say few defendants can boast as much personal tragedy and suffering as Mr. Polanski, but many of the usual champions of moral relativism are saying: "Tough. Justice is blind."

And yet, only a few short months ago, many of those same liberal voices -- including the Times and the Post -- were staunchly defending the school of judicial thought that does take account of defendants' and plaintiffs' life experiences, and does incline judges to side with those whose life experiences arouse empathy. Among the qualities President Obama listed as his criteria for nominating justices to the Supreme Court, consider the following:

"We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be ... poor, or African American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

While we're at it, why not add "or a Holocaust survivor, or the widow of a murdered spouse" to the list? Surely those experiences rank among the most difficult and painful of human conditions.

So I merely hope that all the liberal editorial writers and pundits who embraced "empathy" as a judicial philosophy only a few months ago will take a moment to reflect on the inconsistency of refusing to apply it to Roman Polanski. Perhaps a few of them will concede that their ardent desire to see justice done in this particular case without regard for murky notions of mitigating circumstances ought to be the mindset that every judge brings to every case, every day.