Among the remarkable details of Roman Polanski’s arrest last fall was the notably different reaction to it on the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean. While the North American media published explicit and condemnatory accounts of Polanski’s rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, in Europe the reaction was much more ambivalent. The governments of France and […] More »

Steven W. Beattie writes today on the Maisonneuve blog about “The Troubling Case of Roman Polanski,” arguing that the condemnations that have burst forth in the last couple of days following Polanski’s arrest is “a failure of one of the artist’s most significant attributes: empathy.” Polanski’s crime – and all its attendant issues of patriarchy, […] More »