Well, historical cultures that harshly police male / female social interactions often tend to think that rape victims were inviting it. after all, if you refuse to shake hands with men, you won’t get raped, would be the theory.
Why is it so important to you if Polanski is a good or bad guy? You don’t know him. Probably never even met him. What’s it to you? Besides an act done thirty years doesn’t defined a person today.
I believe the girl has said all the publicity has harmed her more than the sex. You are with this thread participating in something that by her own words harms her more than Polanski did. Are you a bad guy?
Ridiculous US sex crime laws have poisoned the well for legitimate sex crimes. The first thing that comes to my mind when someone convicted of a sex crime in the USA is something along the line of another teenage dude being convicted as a paedophile for receiving naughty images of his 17yo girlfriend.
You raise a good point, but it really is a different issue. There’s an excellent article in the current Atlantic Monthly about this (not sure if the online version is yet available to non-subscribers.) The gist of the article is that the last thing you mentioned is rarely about sex at all, by any definition of the word. So, has little to do with this thread – which was your point, of course – that the legal system is struggling to deal with something which, according to the statutes, is a sex crime even though it isn’t; meanwhile, some idiots are defending someone who actually did commit a sex crime. But note that the US legal system does seem to have gotten the Polanski issue right.
It’s more the opposite. Folks like Zealot who minimize horrible sex crimes, poison the well for people who would like to make sex crime laws a tad less harsh in the marginal, relatively innocuous cases.
I’d venture to say that someone who’s an active fugitive from justice is committing an act today, not thirty years ago.
Empty the prisons. They are full of people not defined by past acts.
He was in a committed relationship with her mother to the point they jointly adopted children together. He was in every way an adult guardian to her as part of a family unit even though he didn’t adopt her.
The man-child known as Allen started his adult life by marrying a 16 year old. He had an affair with a 17 year from one of his movies.
While he might not be “Charles Manson bad” on the scum scale I have no use for him.
I’d like to hear this explanation too.
But… but… he’s a frickin’ genius making some of the deepest and most important films of this or any other time!
Merely for the sake of context, he was 19 at the time, and it was 1956. I wouldn’t consider that in and of itself worthy of condemnation.
I neither dispute nor disagree with the rest of your post, though. Allen is among those artists hose personal failings make it all but impossible for me to enjoy his (at times genius) body of work.
I have zero fondness for Woody Allen, and you’re right about his quasi-stepdaughter, but his affair with the 17 y/or wasn’t illegal. 17 is the age of consent in New York, according to Law and Order: SVU.
The fact that she doesn’t feel he should be jailed now doesn’t change the fact that a crime occurred then, and that it is a crime in which the state and the people have an interest in the pursuit of justice that supercedes merely the opinion of the victim.
When the rich are able to flaunt the law with impunity, it harms us all.
We’re not putting people in prison for being bad guys. People are put in prison for breaking the law.
The topic of the thread isn’t if he should be put in prison, but if he is a bad guy. If it’s true that the girl says the continuous public exposure of the case harms her more than the actual sex, does than make the OP a bad guy?
Woody Allen married Harlene Rosen when he was 19 and she was 16. 16-year-olds are allowed to marry in New York if they have the consent of their parents (and marriage is considered to allow one to ignore the age of sexual consent). There was no crime committed then, and 16-year-olds getting married wasn’t particularly rare in 1954. He had sex with Stacey Nelkin when she was 17 and had sex with Soon-Yi Previn when she was 19. Both of those relationships were legal in New York.
I’m taking no position on whether any other illegal acts happened. I’m taking no position on whether he’s a terrible person. I’m just saying that the above sexual acts were not illegal.
I can’t deny what you’re both saying. He’s within the law. I wouldn’t let him near a teenaged girl.
Polanski is a different matter. If that was my daughter he would done well to serve time in prison.
No.
Which Polanski did. He belongs in a cell, at the very least. I have a daughter the same age as his victim. I teach girls in that age group. A shallow, unmarked grave would be a better choice than a cell for him, but that isn’t my decision to make.
Re Woody Allen. Charlie Chaplin married a recently turned 18yo girl, and had affairs with younger girls. Water is wet, the Pope is Catholic, and the world is full of men who likes teenage girls. Which doesn’t make having sex with a girl you know is 13yo ok, but I don’t know if that makes him still a bad guy thirty years later. People do change and lots of things can have happened in three decades.
And what was the AoC in Chaplin’s day and in the state where these acts occurred?