Father Barron offers his thoughts on the recent news of the release of Roman Polanski. Read about it here.
This week, the Swiss government announced that it would not allow the extradition of famed film director Roman Polanski to undergo trial for drugging and raping a 13 year old girl some forty years ago in California. Government spokesmen clarified that they felt the 42 day psychiatric evaluation that Polanski endured just after he pleaded guilty of the crime amounts to a sufficient punishment. Consequently, the Oscar-winning filmmaker is a free man. His release was preceded by an extraordinary show of support on the part of some of the leading directors of the world: Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Jonathan Demme, Pedro Almodovar, and Woody Allen. In the course of an interview with French radio yesterday, Allen opined that the justice department was just “picking on a man of 76 or 77…and wasting an awful lot of money.” You might remember that a few months ago, just after Polanski was detained and his extradition requested, Whoopi Goldberg, speaking on her television show “The View,” said that what Polanski did was “not really rape rape.”