Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Why Are Female Directors Silent About Roman Polanski’s Arrest?

I have yet to hear my fellow female directors calling for Roman Polanski to return to the United States to face sentencing for his admitted guilt of statutory rape.

I guess I mistakenly believed that as women and artists we would be genuinely appalled that a man got away with raping a 13-year-old girl. And now we hear that he did not even pay the victim in the civil lawsuit.

Don’t buy the argument that the passage of years since that crime was committed allows him to avoid judgment. It is just a bogus excuse for a talented director being above the law. We are still tracking down Nazi criminals and bringing them to justice.

Don’t get me wrong. As a child of Holocaust survivors myself, I am sympathetic to Polanski’s horrifying and harrowing childhood. I love his filmmaking and listen to the music from “The Pianist” all the time. I think he deserved the Oscar, but that statue does not also allow him the prize of going scot-free for statutory rape. Rape is rape, Whoopi.

I am so upset that male directors are defending Polanski and no one is speaking out about the rights of young vulnerable girls. Are we going to continue this culture of the male director getting away with rape because young female wannabe wants to be in a film or participate in a photo shoot?

Where are the feminist filmmakers? So far we have only heard publicly from male directors, and yes some actresses, that Polanski should be left alone. I know in the feature world we only make up a sad 5% of directors, but the entertainment industry has to hear our opinions.

Have we lost our voice or did we never have it?

Are we just going to sit back and let Harvey Weinstein — a producer, whose company’s recent film encourages the re-writing of World War II history — speak for the film industry?


Aviva Kempner is a documentary filmmaker. “Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg,” Kempner’s documentary about the actress and screenwriter Gertrude Berg, was released earlier this year.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.