Quentin Tarantino hasn’t come out of the past few days smelling like roses. Firstly he was slammed after Uma Thurman alleged he forced her to do a dangerous stunt (which he later apologised for), and now audio has emerged of him defending Roman Polanski.
Disgraced director Polanski pled guilty to sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl in 1977, but fled to Europe to avoid facing any jail time. In the pre-#MeToo era, a number of Hollywood luminaries – including Harvey Weinstein – defended Polanski for a number of extremely flimsy reasons. Yes, this is despite the fact he admitted to sexually assaulting a child.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOEvXPzrCP0
The audio comes from an interview with shock jock Howard Stern, who expresses horror that Tarantino would defend Polanski. “How can you defend… I don’t understand this, how come Hollywood embraces this madman, this director who raped a 13 year old,” Stern said.
“He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape…he had sex with a minor,” Tarantino replies. Continuing, he embarks on one of the more questionable defences one can issue of such a monumentally terrible crime:
That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violent, throwing them down – it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world. You can’t throw the word rape around. It’s like throwing the word ‘racist’ around. It doesn’t apply to everything people use it for.
When Stern’s co-host Robin Quivers interjected to remind Tarantino that Polanski had plied the teenage girl with alcohol and drugs, Tarantino rejected it. “No, that was not the case at all,” he said. “She wanted to have it and dated the guy.”
He also makes a bizarre comment about how the morals in Europe are different to the morals in the United States, while reiterating that he believed the girl in question was “down with this.”
Look, it’s all very, very gross. Might be curtains for Quentin.
