Bad Moments in History: The time a convicted child molester got a standing ovation at the Oscars.
Film-maker Roman Polanski, now 92, was born in Paris to a Polish-Jewish father and Russian-part Jewish mother, although he would later claim to be atheist. Just like Golda Meir, the fourth prime minister of Israel.
Paramount reportedly brought Polanski to the US to direct the 1968 movie Rosemary’s Baby. The ‘horror-thriller’ film is about Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), a young housewife who is impregnated by the devil.
On August 9, 1969, while Polanski was in London, his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four other people were murdered at the Polanskis' LA residence by followers of cult leader Charles Manson.
Polanski recovered from this gruesome event by teaming up with fellow deviant and porn mogul Hugh Hefner to create an X-rated version of the Shakespeare classic Macbeth (1971).
Polanski the Hebephile
In 1977, Polanski, then 44, had been commissioned by the French version of Vogue magazine, Vogue Hommes, to take a series of photographs of adolescent girls. If you’re wondering why a leading magazine of so-called “haute couture, beauty, fashion, culture” would see fit to commission such a project, the highly dysfunctional fashion industry has long been a bastion of hebephilia (not to mention human trafficking). The degenerate Polanski, it turns out, was also a hebephile.
Polanski said he wanted to portray the young teens as "sexy, pert, and thoroughly human". As part of this perverted project, Polanski was introduced to a 13-year-old girl named Samantha Gailey (now Samantha Greimer). In February 1977, Polanski had shown her a Vogue magazine shoot he had produced, and asked “Would you like me to take your pictures?”, to which the young girl agreed.
On February 20, Polanski conducted an outdoor photo shoot with Greimer, during which he told her to take her top and bra off. She told a Grand Jury she had not been told beforehand the shoot would involve topless work, and the experience left her not wanting to take part in another photo shoot.
However, on March 10, 1977, Polanski returned to her house “in a rush” insisting they head out for another shoot, using the pretext that the sun was going down and hence natural light was diminishing.
When the light became too dim during this second outdoor shoot, Polanski took the young teen to Jack Nicholson’s Mulholland house (Nicholson was in Aspen at the time).
In her Grand Jury testimony, Greimer said the relocated shoot began outside the mansion, before moving inside, where Polanski plied her with some of Nicholson’s “1971” (Cristal) champagne. He then lured her to the Jacuzzi, telling her he wanted to photograph her inside the tub.
Prior to getting into the Jacuzzi, Polanski further plied the teen - still wielding a champagne glass and by this point “pretty drunk” - with the sedative-hypnotic drug Quaalude.
Polanski took some photographs, then stripped naked and jumped in, commencing his physical attempt to molest the girl. She resisted, got out of the tub, feigned asthma, and said she wanted to go home.
Polanski instead steered her to a large bedroom, where - in spite of her constant and clear objections - he raped her orally, vaginally and anally.
Polanski then told her not to tell her mother what had transpired, but after being driven home Greimer proceeded to do just that. Her mother called the police and Polanski was arrested the following day. He faced six charges: Unlawful sexual intercourse with a female under the age of 18, rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, a lewd and lascivious act upon a child under the age of 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor.
As self-entitled narcissists are wont to do, Polanski insisted he was the victim, a stance he maintains to this day. He claimed he’d been duped into the encounter by the 13 year old and her mother. As part of this alleged conspiracy, Polanski claimed they had exaggerated the girl’s age and “there was no doubt about [Greimer’s] experience and lack of inhibition.”
He hotly denied giving her a Quaalude, even though he had one on him when he was arrested.
Supposedly to protect Greimer’s identity at the time, her attorney asked for the six felonies to be replaced with the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
Polanski plead guilty plea to this lesser charge. Despite his earlier claim to being misled about Greimer’s age, he admitted to the judge he had known she was 13 at the time.
The presiding judge, Laurence J. Ritterband, sent Polanski to Chino prison for a 90-day psychiatric evaluation, the expected outcome being a probationary sentence and deportation. Shockingly, the psychiatric report described the 13 year old victim as “not only physically mature, but willing” and assessed Polanski was neither a “pedophile or sexual deviant.”
Polanski was released from Chino after 42 days.
There are varying accounts in circulation as to exactly what followed, but all seem to agree that:
- Ritterband wasn’t a Polanski fan;
- Polanski got wind Ritterband was going to discard whatever agreements had previously been arrived at and instead impose a prison sentence.
On February 1, 1978, Polanski fled the US by boarding a flight to London. The following day he flew to Paris where, as a French citizen, he was insulated from extradition.
Polanski has never returned to the US, fearing arrest, further charges, and sentencing.
In September 2009, Polanski was arrested in Switzerland after travelling there to receive an award, and extradition proceedings began.
The French were pissed.
“To see him thrown to the lions and put in prison because of ancient history — and as he was traveling to an event honoring him — is absolutely horrifying,” French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said after Polanski was arrested upon arrival in Switzerland to attend the Zurich Film Festival, where he was to receive a lifetime achievement award. “There’s an America we love and an America that scares us, and it’s that latter America that has just shown us its face.”
I’m guessing, despite any pretenses to the contrary, that French authorities love the current US, led by a tangerine sexual deviant eager to make the Epstein saga go away.
In July 2010, Switzerland rejected the US request to extradite Polanski.
In 2015 and 2016, Poland - where Polanski also holds citizenship - subsequently moved to extradite the director, but both attempts were blocked by the Polish courts.
Despite reaching a 2024 settlement with Greimer, Polanski is still officially sought for extradition by the US government, and still remains on INTERPOL’s international wanted list.
Another woman came forward to sue Polanski in 2024, alleging she’d been raped by the director in Los Angeles in 1973 when she was still a minor. Similar to the 1977 case, the woman alleged Polanski had plied her with tequila shots, before forcing himself upon her.
The suit was settled that same year in an undisclosed settlement between the parties.
Also in 2024, British actress Charlotte Lewis broke down in a French courthouse after losing a defamation case against Polanski. After accusing the filmmaker of raping her when she was 16, she said he waged a “smear campaign” against her. The case was connected to a 2019 interview with magazine Paris Match in which the director said Lewis had lied about the alleged assault. Lewis first made her allegations public in 2010, saying she’d been sexually abused by Polanski “in the worst possible way” in 1983 during a casting session for his film Pirates.
The ruling did not assess the truth of the rape allegation but instead was solely concerned with whether Polanski’s comments in the interview constituted defamation.
So to sum up:
Polanski was accused of raping a 13 year old girl. Her testimony was coherent, and what she described is consistent with the methodology of sex predators (e.g. isolating the victim under pretenses seemingly unrelated to sex, plying the victim with alcohol and drugs, and gradual escalation of the encroachment).
Polanski, meanwhile, lied about his knowledge of the victim’s age and was found in possession of a drug he denied giving to the victim.
Even if we’re to believe Polanski and the grubs who continue to defend him, the fact remains he willingly accepted a wholly inappropriate assignment to photograph young teens with the intent of portraying them in a sexual manner.
He admitted in court, after initially lying, that he knowingly had sex with one of these teens, when she was a mere 13 years old.
In clinical terminology, a person with an attraction to children aged 11-14 is known as a hebephile. No matter how physically developed someone in this age group may be, they are still firmly ensconced in their formative years, why is why the law recognizes them as children.
This means Roman Polanski is officially a statutory rapist and child molester.
Having clarified that matter, let’s now turn our attention to events that occurred in 2003 that conclusively demonstrate how incurably degenerate Hollywood really is.
On March 23 of that year, the world’s most glamorous deviants congregated for the annual self-congratulatory wankfest that is the Academy Awards.
There were five nominations for Best Director award. Despite everything already known about Polanski - including his conviction for child molestation and his fugitive status - he received a nomination for his film The Pianist.
That in itself is disgraceful.
But it got worse.
After the nominations were listed, Harrison Ford - the actor of Irish and Ashkenazi Jewish descent who starred in Polanski’s 1988 film Frantic - proceeded to announce the winner:
Roman Polanski.
Academy Award winners are determined by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which includes 10,000+ industry ‘professionals’ such as actors, directors, and producers.
This conglomeration of film industry participants had decided, by a majority, that the most fitting winner for the 2003 Best Director award was a convicted child molester.
But wait, it got worse still.
After the sinister-looking Ford announced Polanski as the winner, the audience did not hiss and boo.
Nor did they simply sit there in stunned silence, shocked and appalled by the Academy’s depravity.
Instead, they clapped, cheered, whistled and got out of their seats to give Polanski a standing ovation.
Here, see for yourself. Try not to punch your screen, computers are expensive.
Martin Scorcese, one of the nominees, forever established himself as an utter disgrace to Italians worldwide by being among the first to stand and applaud Polanski’s win.

Scorsese was also among the Disgraziati who signed a petition requesting the release of Polanski when he was arrested in Switzerland in 2009.
That petition, it must be noted, was also signed by another huge embarrassment to Italians, the egregious #metoo hypocrite Asia Argento*. In 2018, as #metoo gained traction and she presented herself as a spokesperson of the movement, the actress made a pretense of condemning the petition even though she signed it. Her FOS (Full Of Shit) status was confirmed beyond all doubt that same year when she was exposed for molesting an underage teen. In August 2018, the New York Times revealed she’d been accused of sexually assaulting actor Jimmy Bennett in 2013, when he was just 17 and she was 37 (the alleged offence occurred in California, where the clearly stipulated legal age of consent is 18). In an attempt to keep the matter quiet, Argento had settled the sexual assault accusation for the sum of $380,000.
Argento abused the “mother-son relationship” she developed with Bennett to lure him to a hotel room, ply him with alcohol, then have sex with him. During the encounter, Argento - clearly not the sharpest tool in the shed - asked Bennett to take photos of them together, one of which she posted to Instagram later that day (the post has since been removed).
Bennett was prompted to take action after seeing Argento become a vocal face of #metoo. When Argento brazenly denied ever having had sex with Bennett, his attorneys produced the photos and an okay-genius-how-do-you-explain-these-then letter.

Like Polanski, the shamelessly hypocritical Argento has never apologized or expressed remorse for having sex with a minor. Like Polanski, she played the victim and pretended not to know Bennett’s age despite having known him for at least a decade, referring to his intent to sue notice as a “shakedown letter”. While happy to vocally repeat her claim about being raped at 21 by Harvey Weinstein (whom, by her own admission, she continued to have consensual sex with for the next five years), she consistently ignored media inquiries about the matter of her having sex with a minor at age 37.
On behalf of persons bearing Italian heritage, I hereby declare we don’t claim this pezzo di merda deviante.

Getting back to the 2003 Oscars, it’s clear Jewish-American actor Adrian Brody was elated by Polanski’s win.

Italian/German-American actor Nicolas Kim Coppola, more widely known as Nicolas Cage, heartily applauded Polanski’s win.
So too did Jack Nicholson, who identifies as Irish and the owner of the mansion where his buddy Polanski molested a 13 year old.

Any decent guy who discovered an associate had committed a chomo act in his house would be enraged, but not Nicholson. The Shining actor was in fact a staunch defender of Polanski after his 1977 arrest, “a veritable one-man defense committee for the director - rallying friends, giving public statements in Polanski’s defense”.
Harrison Ford Stoops Even Lower
You might be thinking, “hey, don’t be too hard on ol’ Indiana Jerkoff, maybe the bloke was put on the spot that night and reluctantly announced the winner.”
No.
Five months after the Oscars, Ford traveled to the Festival of American Film in Deauville, France to personally deliver the statuette to Polanski.
“Maybe we should kiss...with tongues,” proffered Polanski, referring to the previous week’s MTV Awards and the antics of Madonna, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
The kind of thing you’d expect a creepy old man with a sex offence conviction to say.
Whether Harrison later fulfilled Polanski’s amorous overture is unknown, but the actor told a German magazine he was keen to play a “bad guy” but never got any offers.
You already did that at the 2003 Academy Awards, mate.
In 2018, the Academy did an Asia Argento and portended to be genuinely appalled by the same guy it proudly gave an Oscar to in 2003. It voted to expel Polanski and Bill Cosby from its membership. This came after the expulsion of Harvey Weinstein the previous October.
In Polanski’s case, the expulsion came more than 40 years after he was accused of raping a 13-year-old girl, and 15 years after he won his best director Oscar.
Summary
One of the recurring themes while I was compiling this article was of minors being left alone with older, unrelated adults.
Greimer’s mother unwisely let her daughter drive off alone with Polanski.
When Bennett arrived at Argento’s hotel room that fateful 2013 morning, he was accompanied by a family member, according to his notice of intent. Argento asked the family member to leave so she could be alone with the actor. The family member evidently complied, and Argento then gave Bennett alcohol to drink (the legal drinking age in California is 21).
If I was a parent and my child got involved in the modelling or acting/music arenas, it would be a non-negotiable condition that until they were of legal age, I or my wife would chaperone them to any activities this work entailed. If any employers or contractors had a problem with this, they would be greeted with a deep, sincere invitation to engage in self-copulation.
In fact, given the history of these industries, I’d further submit that the presence of a parent or responsible legal guardian should be a mandatory prerequisite.
If older adults want to see youngsters they have worked with in a ‘social’ capacity but in the absence of a parent or responsible relative, the answer should be an unequivocal no.
The modelling and entertainment industries have way too many deviants, and far too long a track record of predation, to be blindly trusted with the welfare of youngsters.
As for adults, it’s time to actively boycott anything coming out of Hollyweird. The film industry is a giant sewer pit, the inhabitants of which are egregiously presented as glamorous and worthy of adulation when they are anything but.
*Argento’s father is Italian horror film director Dario Argento; her maternal greatgrandmother was the Jewish Yvonne Fanny Müller Loeb; Yvonne’s husband and Argento’s maternal greatgrandfather was the Italian composer and Benito fanboy Alfredo Casella.
Note: In keeping with Australia’s new Hurty Words Act 2026, any mention of ethnic/religious background in this article is provided purely for historical and educational purposes.