Roman Polanski's life of crime

So: there is a movement to free Roman Polanski, who has been arrested in Switzerland, after he arrived to collect a lifetime achievement award at a Zurich film festival, on a decades-old outstanding warrant relating to the statutory rape of Samantha Gailey in 1977.

There is no debate that Polanski raped Gailey: he has never denied sexual contact with her, and in fact pleaded guilty to "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor" in 1977, but instead has attempted to argue that the act was consensual. He was 44. She was 13.

After pleading guilty, Polanski fled the US and has spent most of his time in countries that do not have an extradition treaty with the US. For the last three decades, he has had defenders – many of them in the American film community, and in the French and Polish governments – argue that his self-imposed exile to avoid prison has been a worse punishment than any he would have been sentenced to, and that the charges should thus be dropped.

But the mere specifics of his arrest – that he was to be the recipient of a lifetime achievement award – expose that assertion for the folly it is. Polanski has had a very successful career, working with a string of notable American and British actors who didn't hold his "sexual peccadilloes" (such as, being a confessed rapist) against him: Harrison Ford, Sigourney Weaver, Johnny Depp, Adrien Brody, Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, Ben Kingsley, Kim Catrall, Olivia Williams. He even managed to win an Oscar for best director, in 2003, for The Pianist. It was an important victory in what had already become a very public crusade to rehabilitate his reputation and legacy.

In the Washington Post, the commentator Anne Applebaum – who calls Polanski's arrest "outrageous" and passionately argues for his release – says: "If he weren't famous, I bet no one would bother with him at all." Which rather seems to be missing the point. If he weren't famous, he would not have been free to flee in the first place. And he would certainly not number among his public defenders a columnist writing for the Washington Post.

In fact, I daresay he wouldn't have many defenders at all.

Very few, if any, of the people who have publicly defended Polanski, or who have worked with him, make it their business to champion or associate themselves with admitted child rapists. They make an exception for Polanski for the same reason exceptions have been for other famous, artistic men – directors, writers, actors, comedians, singers, musicians, dancers, choreographers, painters, sculptors, photographers – who have been known to sexually assault women and/or children: Because geniuses get special dispensation.

Because there's only one Roman Polanski.

So goes the breathless defense of the artiste, while the flipside of that particular coin, because thirteen-year-old girls are a dime a dozen, goes unspoken.

France's minister of culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, was quoted as saying: "In the same way as there is a generous America which we love, there is also a certain kind of America which is frightening, and it is this America which has now shown us its face." But for survivors of sexual assault, an America that more highly values art over accountability is frightening – and that pernicious cultural narrative should be frightening to every American for the message it communicates to potential rapists (and actual serial rapists) within the artistic community. Some artists, we tacitly agree, are so important that others must sacrifice for their art, too.

We have long prioritised men's art over women's safety, because there is a belief that a talented man, an auteur with a vision, might change the world, and to truncate that grand possibility with something as bourgeois as justice would be devastating.

The irony, of course, is that failing to hold a rapist accountable for his crime doesn't change the world at all – it merely perpetuates a status quo in which most rapists are not identified; of those who are, few are charged, and of those who are charged, vanishingly few are convicted.

Polanski's defenders have long argued that the small-minded pursuit of accountability was stifling a radical innovator, but the outcome with most revolutionary potential has always been holding Polanski to a standard unqualified by his vocation.

Clarification: Many commenters have simply used the term "rape" in relation to Roman Polanski's 1977 conviction. The offence he pleaded guilty to is often described as "statutory rape" but more precisely as "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor"

Melissa McEwan, a freelance writer and founder of the progressive blog Shakespeare's Sister.