We must separate the art from the dark deeds of the artist

As it is, though, Hollywood apart, most Americans seem to think that Polanski must have what is coming to him and that those who call for bygones to be bygones fail to understand that the law is bigger than any of thosewho break it.

LIKE me, you are probably not familiar with that many of the films Roman Polanski has directed. One, however, The Pianist, strikes me as a true masterpiece of modern cinema. It is the brilliantly portrayed true story of a Jew who managed to escape Hitler’s genocide and emerged, in one piece, from the ruins of Warsaw as the Russians moved in late in 1944.

But it is not for his film-making that Polanski has been in the news. For more than 30 years he has been dogged by the events of one night at the actor Jack Nicholson’s Los Angeles home when he raped and sodomised a 13-year old girl, Samantha Geimer, whom he had plied with drugs and alcohol first. She told a jury she said “no” and “stop” repeatedly and told him she wanted to go home.