The famous film director Roman Polanski was recently arrested in Zurich for a rape case that he has been fleeing since 1977, when he lured a 13-year-old girl into Jack Nicholson’s house under the guise of a photo shoot, serving her champagne and Quaaludes.

The topics of pedophilia, celebrity, film, and sexual assault, stir up a great deal of fervor and consternation in the United States and in France; while the French tend to support Polanski’s release, “America’s puritanical morals want him to be lynched,” in the words of my Parisian friend.

The story of Polanski’s life is a nightmarish epic: internment in a concentration camp where he witnessed the death of his mother, the brutal murder of his pregnant wife by the Manson Family, and the eruption of his own senseless cruelty and resulting fugitive lifestyle. Polanski is equipped with the ultimate survival skills and continues to create, in spite of the horrors of his own reality.

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