I wasn’t the girl who walked out of the bedroom after being raped, dazed and confused, shoving toilet paper in the crotch of my underwear and wondering how I would put the pieces back together. I got raped, I accepted it. It didn’t scar me or redefine my life or demeanour and it definitely didn’t ruin me any more than had already been done.
But I’m one of the rare few and I’m conscious of it. I feel badly about the people who had a hard time, a terrible time, the ones who still dream, feel like they’re suffering it again and again. The people who shrink away from a touch, who can seemingly never fully trust another person who might have that power again.
Logically, I understand it; emotionally, I don’t.
I can watch episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit without flinching. I think it’s something wrong in the wiring of my brain.
Anyway.
The recent events surrounding Roman Polanski’s arrest, Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on The View and all of the Free Roman spectators and support has pissed me the fuck off. He, a director, actor, writer had something really shitty happen to him in the form of his wife’s murder. He grew up in the ghetto in Poland, his father was put to work in a camp during World War II and for all I know, my great-grandfather might have been one of the fucking assholes responsible for his mother’s death in Auschwitz.
He’s had a hard row to sow, so to speak.
That doesn’t excuse anything.
The fact that anyone would support his want for freedom from prosecution makes them also a fucking asshole to me – I don’t care if he’s a genius or whatever. There is no way, ever in my lifetime, that I will consider sex between a 13-year old and a 44-year old okay.
Even if it’s consensual. Because there’s no such thing with such a large age gap, especially with such a child. Because there’s such things as trust, power and position of authority – all of which the 44-year old had in this situation.
Even if she showed up at his hotel, car, home, film set or the bar’s bathroom, slipped herself a roofie after downing half a bottle of champagne and said “Daddy, I’ve been a bad girl.”
Even if she’d already slept with half the football team, blown all of the chess club and was hooking for meth.
There’s no way it’s okay for a 44-year old man to have sex with a 13-year old girl.
There’s no way that isn’t rape, and there’s no way that that act – the one that involved oral, anal and vaginal sex – being called rape-rape or sex with a minor, will ever be justified.
There’s just no way.
If my daughter were to come home, tell me that someone had given her booze and drugs and then had forcible sex with all of her major orifices while she said no, I wouldn’t stop to consider the individual’s career – I would be out for blood. Regardless of whether she was 13 or 19 or 29 or 40, and he was 13 or 19 or 29 or 44 or 62.
I wouldn’t have allowed that person to go about the world for two decades having served less than half of his plea bargain and I sure as hell wouldn’t understand anyone enraged by his arrest after fleeing his punishment. In fact, I don’t know that I would be able to accept a plea bargain in the first place and the likelihood of me scouting for assassins would be high.
Sometimes, people just disgust me.
