I’m not sure why I’m so interested in this story. I guess it’s because I really can’t get my head around the fact that there are people who would excuse the rape of a child because the rapist is a movie director. Anyway, here’s your roundup for today…

More From the Horse’s Mouth
From the rapist’s memoirs – he vividly describes sex with multiple other underage girls, and goes into the details of the night in question.

I won’t excerpt it here. The excerpt at the link also spares you the most gruesome details. But there’s enough to get the point. It certainly doesn’t smack of remorse.

Feminists for Child Rape
Via the LA Times:

“My personal thoughts are let the guy go,” said Peg Yorkin, founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “It’s bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It’s crazy to arrest him now. Let it go. The government could spend its money on other things.”

Interesting how everyone’s a fiscal conservative all of the sudden. It’s about the cost, or something.

A Growing Consensus?
Both stories that I already linked above mention that the faux outrage is concentrated among the “artistic elites” in both France and the US, and that rest of us are rightfully appalled.

Reason has a roundup of their own:

That comes one day after a similar editorial in The New York Times, and two days afer the hometown L.A. Times. An incomplete roll call of unsympathetic commentators would include Steve Lopez, Richard Cohen, Eugene Robinson, Peter Bradshaw, Joan Smith, Kerry Dougherty, and many more. Deserving special mention among that list is this brutal deployment of the English language by Salon‘s Kate Harding: “Reminder: Roman Polanksi raped a child.” Even the French government is allegedly dropping its support, and one can more than seldom hear a discouraging word at the telltale heart of Polanskiphilia, The Huffington Post.

Hot Air also covers that beat.

Uh, I don’t think so, Harvey…
Harvey Weinstein, on the other hand, claims that Hollywood has the best moral compass. No really, he did.

In an interview, Weinstein said that people generally misunderstand what happened to Polanski at sentencing. He’s not convinced public opinion is running against the filmmaker and dismisses the categorization of Hollywood as amoral. “Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion,” Weinstein said. “We were the people who did the fundraising telethon for the victims of 9/11. We were there for the victims of Katrina and any world catastrophe.”

Oh Great, Another Petition
Big Hollywood, who has their heart in the right place, is attempting to marshal support for a counter petition. Sorry guys. I’m not sure why we’re still clinging to the petition thing as if they’ve ever changed a mind in the last 30 years. But A+ for effort.

A Fellow Victim’s Opinion
The must read of the day is this article by Robert Goolrick. The author, victim of child rape, makes the following point:

From where I sit—and I have sat exactly in this same spot for sixty years—the rape of a child is absolutely the equivalent of first-degree murder. Roman Polanski is a murderer, the murderer of a child.

And there you have it.