Like a recurring virus that flares up every so often, Roman Polanski is in the news, trying to get back into the country he fled to avoid facing the law.

Thirty years after he became a fugitive to avoid a prison sentence for having sex with a teenager, Academy Award-winning director Roman Polanski asked a judge Tuesday to dismiss the case.

In the motion filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, lawyers for Polanski alleged “repeated, unlawful and unethical misconduct” by a prosecutor and the trial judge and requested that the charge which prompted him to flee the country be dropped “in the interests of justice.”

Justice in this case would be for the press to stop minimizing his crime by saying he ‘had sex with a teenager’. In fact, he pushed drugs and alcohol on a child to render her unconscious after getting her alone on false pretenses by lying to her mother. It was premeditated, and if he had miscalculated the drug dose it could have been homicide.

Samantha Geimer, the survivor, tells her story, in her own words here.

To her great credit, and none of his, she has a good life and only wants the past to be past. The press likes to use her recovery to make it seem like she was not harmed and it was no big deal. Perhaps it would make a better story if she didn’t survive. But the world is full of survivors, of many things. The world is full of perps. Does one more or less in the USA make a difference?

Maybe if Polanski were to acknowledge what he did, to apologize, he would begin to make amends. There’s no reason to assume he’s safe around children, but the harm he can do to individuals now is probably limited. What is much more harmful is a dishonest press.

If Roman Polanski comes back to the US, it will mean that expensive lawyers can make charges go away — no surprise. The press has already cleared him of rape, portrayed him as a victim of a conniving lolita, minimized the truth of what he did. That’s the real crime — that in order to make sense of letting him get away with it, adults have to say that nothing really happened to a child. Some of the pitiful excuses are reviewed here.

The best protection for children is honesty. Age-appropriate education in how to know where the boundaries are, and who they can go to for help. A famous man committed a crime against a child (unfortunately not a rare occurrence). The press seems afraid to call it rape. Adults are failing children by evading the truth, blurring the facts, and minimizing the crime.