Roman Polanski: Everyone wants to fuck little girls.

Keep backing him Hollywood.

Having blogged about Roman Polanski’s arrest, I reread an extraordinary interview Polanski gave to the novelist Martin Amis in 1979, the year after Polanski went on the run. The interview originally appeared in Tatler and is collected in Amis’s excellent book Visiting Mrs Nabokov. Here’s a section of the first quote it contains from Polanski. "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But … fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!" Thirty years have passed since Polanski said those words, so he’s had time to reconsider them. Whether he’s actually done so, we don’t yet know. Perhaps he still thinks it’s true that everyone fancies little girls, and that the press was exaggerating the enormity of his crime, and that all this somehow excuses his behaviour. Later in the interview, Polanski says he likes Paris, to which he’d fled, because it’s “very grown-up”. Unlike the 13-year-old girl with whom he admitted having unlawful sex.

Best Friend of Eric Holder joins Polanski's legal team on the American side.

While a backlash emerged Tuesday among French politicians of all stripes about whether their government and others should have rushed to embrace the cause of the jailed film director Roman Polanski, his American legal team picked up an influential new member: the lawyer Reid Weingarten, a well-known Washington power player and close friend and associate of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. ....The recruiting of Mr. Weingarten was a strong signal that Mr. Polanski’s legal team intends to push hard on the Washington end of the case. Mr. Polanski was arrested on his way to the Zurich Film Festival after Swiss authorities received a letter from the Department of Justice requesting that he be held for possible extradition to the United States. The department sent the letter at the request of Los Angeles prosecutors, who have pursued Mr. Polanski since 1978. He fled the United States that year ahead of his sentencing after pleading guilty to having sex with a minor, part of a plea agreement that allowed him to avoid other charges, including rape and sodomy. Mr. Weingarten is expected to mount a legal effort to block Mr. Polanski’s extradition before the issue works its way through the Swiss legal system, according to people who were briefed on Mr. Weingarten’s involvement, but spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. A critical step will most likely be a move to stop the extradition before United States authorities send the required documents to Switzerland. Mr. Polanski’s team may do so by arguing either that his crime does not qualify for extradition, because he was originally to have been sentenced to less than a year in prison, or that he has already effectively served his sentence, during a 42-day psychiatric evaluation. Mr. Weingarten declined to comment.