Waterboarding Charlotte Lewis

Posted on May 14, 2010 in Abuse PTSD

The Cause for the Canonization of [[Roman Polanski]] took a big hit today when English actress [[Charlotte Lewis]] came out and hinted that he had taken liberties with her during the filming of Pirates in France. It’s important to get clear about what this means: the Los Angeles District Attorney will not and cannot prosecute Polanski for something that happened in France. Nor can the French press charges for child molestation because sex with a sixteen year old girl is legal in that country.

The allegation is not without its ramifications. First, Polanski’s supporters have claimed that he only did it once. Lewis’s story upsets that myth. Second, this revelation can be introduced during sentencing. It doesn’t matter that the act was legal in France: from what I have read, it doesn’t sound like it was consensual which is just as much a crime in France as it is in California. I have no information about the statute of limitations for rape in France, but the case remains open in California because Polanski ran away before he could be sentenced. It matters if Polanski is a serial rapist both in the California court and in the greater court of public opinion. In the first he should receive a harsher sentence under the law which he was found guilty. In the second, he should not receive any more pity.

Polanski’s defenders on Twitter and at the Huffington Post have already begun to do what they can’t do in a court because of rape shield laws: attack the alleged victim. They say that Lewis’s story is not credible because she has only now come out. Those who have suffered the trauma of abuse while in their teens can empathize with her reticence to allude to her experience: when a teenager is set against an adult, the younger person can be readily intimidated into silence and shame. The fear can last well into adulthood.

Then there is the accusation that she is doing this to save her career. “No publicity is bad publicity,” says one Huffington Post commenter who in an earlier post challenged another participant in the thread to “show documentation”. Mark this as a desperate attempt to discredit and to intimidate her by alluding to her age and slow career activity. No court in America would allow this line of reasoning without solid evidence for it. They can’t make any kind of case that Lewis has this motive, so they are reduced to spiteful rumor.

A few have hinted that we shouldn’t take the word of a former Playboy model seriously. But here they have walked into a confrontation with psychological fact. [[Rape trauma syndrome]] has been well documented for many years now. Along with the unsettling of the sense of personal safety and hesistation about entering new relationships

Sexual relationships become disturbed. Many survivors have reported that they were unable to re-establish normal sexual relations and often shied away from sexual contact for some time after the rape. Some report inhibited sexual response and flashbacks to the rape during intercourse. Conversely, some rape survivors become hyper-sexual or promiscuous following sexual attacks, sometimes as a way to reassert a measure of control over their sexual relations.

This shines a different light on Lewis’s sexuality . Her alleged relationship was not a wondrous moment of intimacy between teenager and older man, but distorted. Many a nice woman has turned into a bar slut because she felt ruined by such encounters. The more we look at Lewis’s post-Polanski behavior, the more we may see to affirm her story.

Finally, let’s return to the “it happened in France but it is not relevant” line of bull. I put it to a liberalish ((Mind you this progressive does not feel Polanski deserves our pity. First he ran away. Second, no matter how crushed he felt by losing Sharon Tate to the Manson Family, it does not give him license to become sociopathic.)) defender of Polanski that this was the same kind of reasoning that was used to ship Guantamano detainees to Pakistan and Egypt. Torture was illegal here in the United States making it a bad thing for our own boys to do it. But if we sent them to countries where it was legal, then it was suddenly all right. The “Polanski did it in France” argument is every bit as pathetic. Nevertheless, his champions now step forward to waterboard Charlotte Lewis for outing him as a not-so-nice lech who seduced and maybe raped teen-aged women.