Doesn’t your heart go out to film director Roman Polanski? He was arrested in Switzerland last week and yet all the poor guy had done, according to the 1977 charges against him, was sodomise a 13-year-old girl and force her to engage in ‘oral copulation’. But first he gave her champagne and doped her with a hypnotic drug, which also acts as a sedative and muscle relaxant – so that’s all right then.

Next, in the phrase beloved of crime dramas, he ‘copped a plea’, but fled the US before his case came to court.

And now the US authorities, seemingly not mindful that Polanski is an Oscar-winning Hollywood artiste, have been so churlish as to have him arrested.

OK, that’s enough of the heavy irony. You would expect that most halfway sensible people, and not just those with daughters, would think Polanski has had it coming to him for the last 30-odd years. But you would be wrong. Scores of Hollywood luminaries have got to together a petition calling for Polanski’s immediate release. Film director and actor Woody Allen signed it, as did our very own Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame. The list goes on: Martin Scorsese, Tilda Swinton et al.

Polanski’s supporters are indignant that, after all these years, the US authorities have now asked another country to arrest him – on a warrant extending back to 1977 – and to hold him pending extradition. Why now and not before, they demand to know?

Except it isn’t a ‘sudden decision’ at all. Gazette readers will remember reading in 2003 about how Polanski, in trying to sue Condé Nast Publications for libel, appealed all the way to the House of Lords to be allowed to give evidence by video. He wanted to testify by video because he feared that, if he set foot in the UK, he would be arrested on the warrant for the 1977 rape charge.

The intention to arrest him has been genuine all along.

Samantha Geimer, Polanski’s victim, is now 45-years-old and a mother of three. She has moved on and has forgiven him. But what if she hadn’t had the emotional strength to put it all behind her? What if her life had been blighted by flashbacks, post-traumatic stress disorder, fear of men, horror of intimacy, drug abuse, self-harm, or even suicide?

Would Polanski’s apologists have said Geimer’s tragic life was a small price to pay for the cinematic legacy of Chinatown, Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist and the rest?

For more information on Polanski v Conde Nast Publications Limited: