Confession to everyone reading this: I am a Roger Ebert
fan. Though he occasionally said and did
things in the critical world which leaned toward the ridiculous, he had some
great opinions and is a childhood idol of mine. I still have him on my
Rss feed, and when this article about the Roman Polanski rape case, written by a Mister
Ehrenstein at the Fandoor.com website, showed up I couldn't resist comment.
Mister Ehrenstein's snickering "review" of
Samantha Greimer's autobiography strongly implies that Ms. Greimer was not only
asking for what happened to her, all of the sexual activity she engaged in - including an encounter with her boyfriend
directly after the rape - indicates that she made up her emotional trauma for
money. It suggests that Ms.Greimer's
autobiography - which she wrote as a way to take her narrative out of both
Polanski's hands and the police's - is a silly puff piece, tittering over
Greimer's sarcastic narrator's voice and retrofitting excerpts drawn
from the text to make it look like another simpering tell-all book. It is the
most crystal clear example of rape apologia I've ever read.
