What you say is true, Ken, but recall the McMartin Preschool child abuse case that, starting in the early ’80s, was the longest child sexual abuse trial in US history, spanning nearly a decade. As it says in the Wikipedia entry on the McMartin case:

“In 1990, after three years of testimony and nine weeks of deliberation by the jury, Peggy McMartin Buckey was acquitted on all counts. Ray Buckey was cleared on 52 of 65 counts, and freed on bail after more than five years in jail. Nine of 11 jurors at a press conference following the trial stated that they believed the children had been molested but the evidence did not allow them to state who had committed the abuse beyond a reasonable doubt. Eleven out of the thirteen jurors who remained by the end of the trial voted to acquit Buckey of the charges; the refusal of the remaining two to vote for a not guilty verdict resulted in the deadlock. The media overwhelmingly focused on the two jurors who voted guilty at the expense of those who believed Buckey was not guilty. Buckey was retried later on six of the 13 counts, which produced another hung jury. The prosecution then gave up trying to obtain a conviction, and the case was closed with all charges against Ray Buckey dismissed. He had been jailed for 5 years without ever being convicted of any wrongdoing.”
— Wikipedia, “McMartin Preschool Trial.”

Even though no one was ever convicted in the McMartin case, all of those charged suffered irreparable harm to their reputations and prospects of future employment. Perhaps Polanski noticed that, and the fact that Ray Buckley spent five years in jail even though he had not been convicted of any crime. There was a child abuse hysteria in this country at that time (still is), and, as a foreigner and easy target, maybe Polanski didn’t want to be a focal point of the witch hunt.

Again, all of this is hard to say without the details of what Polanski did available. He’s been convicted in the US media, of course, but so was Richard Jewell.

Re: the Richard Jewell case. At one point, thanks to the Big Media hysteria and constant assurances by their ‘experts’ that Jewell fit the profile of a typical disgruntled bomber, it was impossible to find an unprejudiced jury anywhere in this country, so you’re right — if Jewell had been tried, he would have doubtless been quickly convicted.

As Ron Ostrow at Journalism.org writes in “Richard Jewell and the Olympic Bombing”:

“Jewell was interviewed by the Secret Service, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the FBI on July 27, the day of the explosion, and again on July 28. In those interviews, investigators considered him a witness, not a suspect. That began to shift during the afternoon of July 28, when, according to the Justice Department, the president of Piedmont College, Ray Cleere, called the FBI in Atlanta after seeing Jewell interviewed on television.

“Cleere raised the possibility that Jewell could have been involved in planting the bomb, basing the suggestion on problems in Jewell’s earlier record as a policeman at the school. On the strength of this information, the FBI decided to run a background check on Jewell. As an example of how this could happen, agents recalled a case in Southern California not long before in which a volunteer firefighter had apparently set a series of fires so that he could extinguish them and become a hero.

“Later the same day, the idea that Jewell was criminally involved was passed along to FBI officials in Washington during a conference call with the Atlanta field office. A participant in the call mentioned that a security guard at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles had planted a bomb on a bus so that he could discover it later and be a hero. FBI headquarters agreed it was logical to conduct a preliminary investigation of Jewell’s background. But most of the discussion during the regularly scheduled call dealt with other suspects.

“That evening, the FBI learned Jewell had been arrested in 1990 for impersonating a police officer and had had employment problems while serving as a deputy sheriff in Habersham County, Georgia. Agents from the FBI’s profiling and behavioral assessment unit in Quantico, Va., reviewed videotapes of the young guard’s television interviews.

“By the next morning, July 29, FBI headquarters was advised that the profiling unit agents “concurred with Atlanta’s assessment that Jewell fit the profile of a person who might create an incident so he could emerge as a hero.” In a more-detailed written analysis faxed to Washington and Atlanta two hours after the preliminary report, the profiling team said Jewell’s “account of the bombing seemed vague on important points and that he seemed uncomfortable discussing the victims.”

No evidence, no proof of anything, just vague suspicions based on FBI profiling and a college president’s wrongheaded hunch. As Ostrow mentions:

“This case study of the Richard Jewell story was written by journalists, not lawyers…” and not evidence.

But did it teach our Big Media a lesson? Keep dreaming — except they now use the term ‘person of interest’ rather than ‘suspect,’ but the same hired ‘experts’ are still on the air giving their opinions on important cases.

Of course, it was ultra-right-wing nutcase Eric Rudolph who actually committed the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing, as well as other crimes, but not one BM ‘expert’ even mentioned his name at the time.

Sorry, Ken, but I’m not familiar with Dave Marsh — is he coming at it from the right or left perspective or what?

This country is having the same problem with sex we’ve had since the idiot Puritans — talk about a love-hate, mostly hate, relationship. Sexual repression detrimentally affects the mind and lack of sexual expression tends to make one obsessed with sex, especially the sexuality of those who apparently are enjoying themselves without guilt. (Sound like any Republicans we know?) An unfortunate, if not permanent, part of the American character is that we always want to deny to others the pleasures we’ve forsaken, whether it be smoking tobacco, drinking, food or sex. This why these and other issues are so intensely personal rather than just a scientific disagreement or ‘policy difference’, i.e.: look at the leaders of the anti-smoking movement — they were all once moderate to heavy smokers.

Conflating whatever Polanski did with a 13-year-old girl with a consensual relationship between Bill Clinton and the 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky is surreally absurd on its face — it’s the kind of comparison only a Teabagger or Beckophile could make. I also don’t agree that pedophile’s are necessarily incurable — there really isn’t enough scientific information to make that kind of definite judgment, and much of what is available is often tainted by someone who has an axe to grind.

One minor point: Up until recently, it was legal in some states to get married at 13 and 14. I met someone whose grandmother was married to his grandfather when she was 14 and he was 18 in some rural part of the South. In today’s current state of hysteria, his grandpa could have been carted away to jail and labelled a pedophile.

I also know of cases where people were charged with statutory rape and contributing to the delinquency of a minor because the girls came in a couple of hours after curfew on a Saturday night — the girls thus ‘corrupted’ being 17 and the boys being 18. There was no accusation of rape or anything else from the girls involved — the police and prosecutor, with the help of the girls’ parents, made that up on their own. The two boys were convicted and given a year’s supervision — which meant if they were areested for anything within a year’s time, even a traffic violation, the orginal charges would be fully prosecuted. That happened over forty years ago. In today’s crazed legal atmosphere, those boys would have had to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives, for ‘crimes’ that never occurred.

I think we’d be better off with a new designation for kids in their teenage years, one that doesn’t deny the biological fact that they are in puberty, capable of having children, and are, or would like to be, sexually active. Our society’s prescription that teenagers shouldn’t have sex until marriage (at 18 in most states) obviously is a complete failure. It’s time we stopped being ignorant about the matter. But I don’t expect that to happen in the current anti-intelligence, anti-sanity cultural climate.