The Young Roman Polanski And The Rape Of History

ANORAK’S Man in LA looks at the Roman Polanski case, and spots a trend:

THE day Roman Polanski was picked up in Switzerland on a fugitive warrant issued in 1978 after his guilty plea in a child rape case, we led our readers immediately to transcripts of the 13-year-old victim’s testimony about her ordeal with the 43-year-old celebrity director that included drugging her with Champagne and Quaaludes, oral copulation and anal sodomization.

So it’s interesting that this morning, close to a month after Polanski’s September 27th arrest and weeks after the expected Hollywood brouhaha of support has died down in wake of the stark details of the young girl’s words, that the Los Angeles Times chooses to run a lurid recreation of the testimony under the guise of it being somehow “lost in the spectacle.”

What’s more interesting is the Times website editors’ apparent decision to lesson the blow to Polanski and his high-profile Hollywood supporters by using a photo of the criminal apparently taken when he was in his baby-faced early twenties, before he let his hair grow out int he style of the day– a stylistic move the took at least a decade before he, at age 43, admittedly preyed upon a 13-year-old child.

It appears to be a subtle and subliminal flourish. In the Los Angeles Times photo chosen to represent today’s extended story, Polanski looks like a boy. When he ran away, he was a man.

Roman Polanski 1977-1978

- TB

Look out for a shot of a teenaged Polanksi soon…

Anorak

Posted: 24th, October 2009 | In: Media Comments (2) | Follow the Comments on our RSS feed: RSS 2.0 | TrackBack | Permalink