Poor Polanski: Depressed, Facing Longer Sentence Today than in ‘77

Nothing plays on that little violin inside my heart more than hearing some child-sodomizing fugitive has got himself a case of the incarceration blues:

Director Roman Polanski is feeling depressed two weeks after his arrest in Switzerland to face U.S. extradition for a 1977 case involving the rape of a 13-year-old girl, his lawyer was quoted as saying on Sunday.

“I found him to be tired and depressed,” Herve Temime told the Sonntag newspaper, one of two newspapers he talked to after visiting the Oscar-winning director in a Zurich prison.

“Roman Polanski, who is 76, seemed very dejected when I visited him,” Temime told another newspaper, NZZ am Sonntag.

“Polanski was in an unsettled state of mind.”

“Dejected,” “unsettled,” “depressed.” About 1/1000th of what his victim went through. Michael Cieply’s New York Times piece over the weekend probably didn’t do the fugitive director’s mood much good. Cieply makes a very convincing case that had Polanski taken his medicine in 1977, he would have received a lighter sentence than what he’s likely to face today if extradited: (more…)