Roman Polanski and the Myth of the Nonviolent Rapist

On October 1^st, “The Joy Behar Show” featured a debate about Roman Polanski’s recent arrest for fleeing sentencing after vaginally, anally and orally raping a 13-year old girl he had drugged. Behar’s guests highlighted a key barrier to securing justice for rape victims:  the widely held but deeply mistaken belief that unless the victim violently resisted a brutal attack, what she suffered wasn’t really rape.

John Farr, an entertainment writer who called for leniency for Polanski on Huffington Post, stated, “I think that there is a difference between statutory rape and classic rape where there’s violence …where someone is forcibly and violently pinned down and is struggling violently….”

Jane Floyd, a criminal defense attorney who said she didn’t understand why anyone who wasn’t Polanski’s defense attorney would be defending him now, spoke of people’s reactions to what they think of as “stranger, violent rape” as opposed to the reality of sexual assault. “Rape is a crime of violence. And this is something I think to this day men -- many men, not all men – do not understand.  It is a crime of violence.  And they don’t think of it – many men do not – in that way – and that’s part of the problem in discussing this case.”

There are also women who do not understand – for example, Whoopi Goldberg was widely criticized for commenting on “The View” that this case was not “rape-rape.” But, it is not just the public who thinks this way. An Indiana judge imposed a suspended sentence on a prominent businessman convicted of rape stating that the victim sustained no physical injuries and “I think it was obvious it was non-consensual sex, but I don’t believe it was a violent act as most people think of rape.” A New York City judge insisted that because a rape victim sustained no physical injury the rape was not a violent crime.  Federal appellate judges reduced the sentence of a San Juan carjacker/rapist on the ground that since his victim had no cuts or bruises in her vaginal area she had not sustained “serious bodily injury” as the carjacking statute required for a sentencing enhancement. This spring a federal trial court judge in Pennsylvania agreed with a police officer that a young woman’s “failure” to press a nearby alarm button while there was a gun at her head was evidence that she was making up the rape and robbery she had reported and thus she was properly arrested for theft and making a false report. Charges were dropped when the rapist was arrested for another rape nearby with the same modus operandi.

Legal Momentum and its National Judicial Education Program educate the public and the justice system to the reality of rape.  Most rapes are not committed by violent strangers but by someone the victim knows who uses no weapon and inflicts no observable physical injuries. Most victims do not “struggle violently” because they are frozen with fright, dissociate, or fear serious physical injury or death if they do. The Pennsylvania victim who was attacked with a weapon said she did as the rapist demanded because she did not want to die, but serious injury and death are also feared by many victims intimidated by “just” the size and strength of their attackers, who have suddenly turned from someone they thought they knew into hideous monsters capable of anything. Many people are surprised to learn that victims of nonstranger rape who sustain no physical injury apart from the rape itself experience profound psychological trauma. Victims are often unable to trust anyone, including themselves, because they trusted the person who raped them.

In the New York City case Legal Momentum secured press attention which resulted in additional sentencing hearings and a lengthy sentence for the rapist.  In the carjacking/rape case Legal Momentum worked with Congress to quickly secure passage of the Carjacking Correction Act to make clear that rape itself is “serious bodily injury.”  In the Pennsylvania case Legal Momentum recently contributed to a friend-of-the-court brief to the appellate court challenging the myths about how rape victims do and should behave to which the police officer and trial judge adhered.

Thirty-two years ago the U.S. Supreme Court wrote that “[s]hort of homicide, [rape] is the ultimate violation of self.” At the end of the Polanski segment of her October 1^st program Joy Behar rightly observed that “Rape kills the soul. It’s a kind of murder.” It is dismaying that many in the public and the justice system do not yet grasp this reality.

For more information:

• Read the Grand Jury testimony of Polanski’s young victim. She recounts her first photo shoot with the director, when he had her pose topless. Grooming behavior like this is typical of a sexual predator.
• As reported via Air America’s blog, in a 1979 interview with novelist Martin Amis, Polanski stated: “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
• Read Maiming the Soul: Judges, Sentencing and the Myth of the Nonviolent Rapist, an article about the New York City case, which prosecutors and parole/probation still use to inform judges about the lasting impact of rape of any kind, by National Judicial Education Program Director Lynn Hecht Schafran.
•  Read about the Carjacking Correction Act in A Free Ride for Rapists, by National Judicial Education Program Director Lynn Hecht Schafran.
• Read about the 2009 Pennsylvania case in the brief filed in Reedy v. Evanson by thirty-nine organizations dedicated to improving the criminal justice system’s response to women and children who are victims of violence.
  
•  Read about the intersection of sexual assault and domestic violence in the National Judicial Education Program’s Web course Intimate Partner Sexual Abuse: Adjudicating this Hidden Dimension of Domestic Violence at www.njep-ipsacourse.org.  Registration is free and open to all.

 

Comments

[Colorado Criminal Defense Attorney]

Your posts help me many times to take good decisions. Thanks -
Colorado Criminal Defense Attorney

[NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault]

Great article! And thanks for all the work you do. It is SO important that women are not re-victimized by the legal system and the people who seem to think that sexual assault is not a frightening, painful and violent crime..no matter the physical injury level.

[Jackie]

Thank you very much for this excellent and insightful post. Hearing people, both in the media and whom are known to me personally, defend this rapist or try to minimize what he did is making me furious. I appreciate how this post posits and strongly defends the idea that all non-consensual sex is rape, and therefore violent, and that you recount the systemic nature of our society's failure to understand and properly penalize this crime in general and in this specific case. Thank you thank you thank you-- I hope this piece changes many minds.