# How DO You prosecute a 31 year Old case? (R. Polanski)

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-prosecute-a-31-year-old-case-r-polanski/511846>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [September 28, 2009, 2:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-prosecute-a-31-year-old-case-r-polanski/511846 "2009-09-28T14:06:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 34

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**Author:** ![Cesario](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Cesario](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cesario)\
**Post date:** [September 29, 2009, 2:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-you-prosecute-a-31-year-old-case-r-polanski/511846/34 "2009-09-29T02:02:56Z")

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> [@Martin\_Hyde](#):
>
> 1. This wasn’t a case of a promiscuous 13 year old in the 70s who did some drugs and fucked a famous Hollywood director. He lured her to a private residence ostensibly to do a photo shoot, he drugged her and then raped her despite her repeated protests. Let’s not imagine this was just an “age of consent” issue, it was completely forced sex, not just simply a violation of age of consent laws that many view as arbitrary. Any non-rich, non-famous guy in America would have been charged and most likely convicted of rape (or whatever the crime is called in the respective state); not a relatively “minor” offense like the violation of age of consent laws but a true, serious, felony-level rape conviction that would have meant many years incarceration.

If you want people to remember this, stop refering to her age. Stop mentioning that she was a minor, and stop mentioning she was 13. Just call it rape and leave it at that.

You don’t increase the horror by mentioning her age. You diminish it. The existence of the age of consent and the crime of “statutory rape” dilutes the entire concept of rape. When you call something rape that is “everyone was just fine with it until the government came in and decided one of the parties wasn’t allowed to say ‘yes’,” the term rape loses its meaning.

If the girl was saying “no”, and this fact was agreed on by all parties involved, this is rape. Period. Dragging the age of consent into this is only going to serve to diminish the crime and the percieved culpability of the perpetrator.

No one should be punished for having consensual sex, and the entire purpose of statutory rape law is to criminalize consensual sex. By prosecuting him under that law, they’ve guaranteed that people are going to treat this as a perfectly consensual sex act instead of as a rape.

This is yet another reason we shouldn’t have an age of consent. When a “yes” is legally identical to a “no”, there’s no incentive to listen to a “no”.

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