It Never Ends

[Trigger warning.]

I've got a new piece up at the Guardian's CifA responding to Robert Harris' assertion that a "media lynch mob is bent on destroying" Roman Polanski.

In a touching display of generosity to his friend and colleague, Harris describes Polanski as "fighting extradition to the United States after his 1977 conviction for unlawful sex with a minor," which is certainly a genteel way of noting that an admitted sex offender who drugged and assaulted a child continues to deny justice to his victim and the community by refusing to return to the United States and serve out the sentence for his crime. Harris is no doubt a very good friend to Polanski.

He also appears to be very adept at victim-blaming.

Harris is extremely concerned about the "lynch mob" that is out for Polanski, and the evidence he provides of this violent predation is the reporting of allegations made by British actor Charlotte Lewis last week that she was also sexually assaulted by Polanski in 1983. "More than a thousand newspapers across the world have reprinted her story, unchallenged," complains Harris, in an opening salvo to an argument predicated on the truly preposterous idea that the international media is in the business of siding with rape accusers.

Nearly every news account of the allegations I have seen included the detail that Lewis worked on the film Pirates with Polanski reportedly subsequent to the alleged sexual assault – which, by any reasonable measure, is a challenge to the veracity of her accusation, since "Why would she work with him/live with him/have consensual sex with him/have anything to do with him after he raped her?" is a classic victim-blaming trope, rooted in the erroneous idea that a "real" survivor of sexual assault would never voluntarily interact again with one's abuser.

As Harris sniffs: "Lewis alleged that the assault ('the worst possible') took place in 1983, but apparently it was not so horrible that it put her off working with Polanski, since she appeared in his 1986 film, Pirates."

Harris reveals that Lewis is "a former Playboy cover girl, who has not appeared in a film for seven years", and reports that her attorney "briskly responded: 'Next question'," when asked if Lewis was looking for a book deal, thus having slut-shamed Lewis for her past as a nude model and cast her as a desperate out-of-work actress who may be willing to make false rape allegations to find her way back into the limelight.

Read the whole thing here.