What most of us see is not a famous movie-maker but a rake who thought he was secure in the protection of money, power and celebrity, much like the upper-class Englishman of a Victorian novel who takes his pleasure with the upstairs maid. Instead of promising marriage, Polanski promised a photo layout in Vogue. He showed a rake's consideration by throwing in anal sex when he learned that the young girl was not "on the pill." Even then, Mr. Bigshot may have been calculating that he was taking care to avoid a paternity suit.
The victim as an adult suggests that after 37 years she has recovered from the trauma and doesn't want to see Polanski punished. She shows generosity impossible to imagine in a victim in a Victorian novel. Her description of the rape, as told to the Los Angles grand jury three decades earlier, lacks the sentimentality you could find in a Thomas Hardy novel. Her plea for him to stop and take her home was not the plea of a knowing Lolita, but the plaint of a pathetic, frightened child.
Hollywood's attitude can make life hard for young women. A study at Princeton University finds that young women, in twice the number of young men, nurture hopes that what once was called "a one-night stand" can become "a relationship." Far more often than men, women regret that a "hook-up" even happened. The signs of depression grow with the number of her casual sexual partners -- almost half the couples "hooking up" never see each other again.
The Clare Boothe Luce Institute offers emotional support for young women who need help countering pressure from friends who encourage them to enjoy "hookups." The institute's Website, senseandsexuality.com, draws its name from the Jane Austen novel that dramatizes the conflict of reason and feeling in male-female relationships.
Austen never wrote a sexually explicit scene, but her insights into the moral shadings of behavior between a man and a woman give her books their remarkable staying power.
One of Polanski's Hollywood friends expressed sympathy for him but wouldn't sign the petition in support because, he said, he has a daughter of his own. Most of our daughters are never at the mercy, or lack of it, from the likes of Roman Polanski, but they're nevertheless growing up in a world where sense is often missing in their sexuality.