How is it that Hollywood has made Roman Polanski into a cause célèbre?
He’s a paedo, but he’s our paedo. That’s what bricklayers say. Weird, I know, but there you go. He might have drugged and sodomised that little girl, these bricklayers will say, but he’s had a hard life, and he’s so damn good at laying bricks and doing that slathering thing with his little cake slice that surely that should outweigh the time he took that 13-year-old back to his friend’s house, plied her with booze and Quaaludes, joined her in a hot-tub and… oh no, wait. Silly me. I don’t mean bricklayers, do I? No, bricklayers are the ones who hound them off the site and threaten to go at their knackers with a pair of granite blocks, aren’t they? I mean Hollywood celebrities. Sorry. My mistake.
Can somebody explain to me why Roman Polanski has become a Hollywood cause célèbre? Can somebody spell it out to me, very slowly, maybe as though I was even younger than the girl with whom he had dogged, sedated, coercive sex? They’ll pretend to care about Darfur and HIV and saving the planet but you can tell they really care about Roman Polanski.
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