Polanski Wins, Witchhunters Lose

In a victory against the forces of social reaction, on July 12 the Swiss government declared renowned film director Roman Polanski a free man, rejecting a U.S. request to extradite him. Polanski, a French citizen, fled the U.S. for Paris in 1978, having faced multiple felony charges for having had consensual sex with Samantha Geimer, a sexually experienced 13-year-old. After pleading guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with a minor, Polanski served six weeks in prison for “diagnostic testing” and was then threatened with more prison time before he fled. For more than three decades, he has been the target of a vicious, puritanical vendetta whose agents range from U.S. police forces to many liberals and bourgeois feminists. Arrested in Zurich last September, the 76-year-old Polanski spent two months in jail and seven more under house arrest before the ruling by the Swiss Justice Ministry.

In a July 17 Swiss TV interview, Polanski thanked the many people “who kept sending me messages of support during those nine long months.” From the beginning, the Spartacist League has been virtually alone on the U.S. left in defending Polanski. We wrote in “Stop the Puritan Witchhunt Against Roman Polanski!” (WV No. 192, 10 February 1978; reprinted in WV No. 944, 9 October 2009) that what was “genuinely ‘tawdry’ and sordid about the Polanski case is not the actual incident itself, but the vile official persecution and the hideous hypocrisy of it all.” The article went on:

“As communists we oppose attempts to fit human sexuality into legislated or decreed ‘norms.’ The guiding principle for sexual relations between people should be that of effective consent—that is, nothing more than mutual agreement and understanding as opposed to coercion. We hold that any and all consensual relations between individuals are purely their own concern, and the state has no business interfering in human sexual activity.”

As much as we are cheered by this brilliant director and Holocaust survivor’s victory over his persecutors, we note that Polanski still faces an Interpol warrant in effect for 188 countries. A Los Angeles Superior Court spokesman has warned that Polanski could be arrested and sent back to the U.S. if he travels to another country that has an extradition deal with the U.S. Witchhunters: Keep your hands off Roman Polanski!