And apologies for the tangent, but please enjoy (
) this stroll down memory lane when Roman Polanski was awarded an Oscar (in absentia of course because he is a PEDOPHILE). Just watch the crowd when his name is announced.
4 Likes
This is why the trickle, trickle, trickle strategy of the DOJ and White House is so disturbing.
The longer it takes for information to be made public, the greater the suspicion that the truly awful stuff is getting buried and sandwiched in between the merely unbecoming, rude, or benign stuff. I am not a conspiracy theorist by any means. But it’s hard not to conclude that once you’ve dragged Melinda Gates and folks like that onto the stage, there’s an actual and concerted effort to make sure that the illegal stuff stays hidden.
As we used to say, it’s not the crime but the coverup. And now it’s the crime AND the coverup AND the projection AND the “Wag the Dog” tactic of bombing fishing boats in the Caribbean to distract the electorate.
9 Likes
wow - how would those react today? Would Harrison Ford even read the name? Even when the names were mentioned….just wow.
Does that make the audience deranged/complicit?
But it’s a different time. I’m not sure that’s an excuse but that’s what we always say.
Harrison Ford, and many other big stars made films with Roman Polanski long after the world knew he had given a 13 year old girl a quaalude and then sodomized her.
(So disappointing that Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet are also on the list of actors who worked with him.)
Hollywood seems to have distanced itself since the late 2010s post - MeToo, so now he mainly works with European actors.
There are sick, sick people who use their power, money, prestige and influence to normalize this kind of behavior as edgy or transgressive. It is not.
These people read Lolita and get a hard-on. They do not understand even remotely what the book is about.
2 Likes
I’ve always been disgusted by Hollywood’s embrace of Polanski. Totally inexcusable.
11 Likes
Not unlike the business, tech, science, and political worlds’ embrace of Epstein.
Btw Polanski is still working and still winning major awards as recently as 2020, just not in Hollywood.
6 Likes
They understand quite well what the book is about.
Even the people who bought Playboy “for the articles” looked at the pictures.
3 Likes
One of the low points in the history of the Academy Awards, and one that got a lot of well-deserved negative commentary at that time, as I recall.
1 Like
Was Harrison Ford trying not to show obvious disgust or was that his RBF?
Ford starred in Frantic, a Polanski film from the late 80s. He was a vocal supporter of Polanski’s over the years. Also yes, Ford has a hard time cracking a smile. A real grump IRL.
1 Like
Bret Ratner, the guy who did the Melania movie 
had a Polanski cameo in the Rush Hour movie that was filmed in France. Ratner is in the Epstein files. One big circle. 
5 Likes
Life comes at you fast, doesn’t it Brad?
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/paul-weiss-chairman-brad-karp-resigns-2026-02-05/
4 Likes
I may be dense - but other than Trump extorted this guy, what’s his wrong deed ? The article I’m reading, I don’t see anything salacious.
Can you enlighten me ?
I believe he has lied in the past about the extent of the relationship, he claimed it was restricted to professional contact related to his role as counsel for Leon Black. But in fact he was communicating with Epstein right up until his death. If you google, you’ll see the embarrassing stuff - asking woody Allen via Epstein to get his son a job, asking Epstein to pull strings to get him admitted to Augusta golf course.
IIRC his client had an adversarial relationship w Epstein so none of that would be normal.
Brad Karp is a big swinging D in BigLaw. For him to resign is pretty significant.
4 Likes
Also his firm was one of the first to bend the knee to Trump. From the NYT:
”Mr. Karp had been under intense scrutiny within the broader legal community after Paul Weiss reached a deal last year with President Trump to resolve an executive order that could have harmed its business. He had appeared to weather the storm.”
4 Likes
Wonder if Howard Lutnick will face scrutiny. He’s brushed it off.
If I read properly about Mr Karp, he may have public shame but he’s still a Partner.
“Computer science professor David Gelernter ’76 GRD ’77 defended his 2011 description of an undergraduate’s appearance as fitting for its recipient, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in a lengthy Wednesday afternoon email to the dean of Yale’s engineering school.”
“I was recommending her for a job I thought she’d like. When you do that-when you actually care about a rec letter-you keep the potential boss’s habits in mind,” Gelernter wrote in the email to his colleagues, seemingly referring to Epstein. "This one was obsessed with girls (like every other unmarried billionaire in Manhattan; in fact, like every other heterosex male), and if I hadn’t said what I did in that letter ten-odd years ago, he would certainly have called me & asked for a lot more aesthetic detail. (This is how men behave.)”
What a creep. IMO, his email to his colleagues does nothing to excuse him. Makes you wonder how he treated the women he taught (reportedly critical of women in the workplace), as well as other recs he made.
12 Likes
As in yesterday Wednesday, or 1996 Wednesday?
Yale has a history of this - and yet people are falling all over themselves to go. Why not save a few bucks and just go to Barbizon Modeling School.
Amy Chua, a Yale professor who wrote a bestselling book on parenting called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, was known for instructing female law students who were preparing for interviews with Kavanaugh on ways they could dress to exude a “model-like” femininity to help them win a post in Kavanaugh’s chambers, according to sources.
8 Likes
I am perhaps irrationally angered by this story. I hope they can him. He is gross. When he parenthetically said “Obviously, the first advance was hers.” Ha! He wishes. Dirty old man.
3 Likes
I am also being triggered by this but i don’t think it’s irrational.
When a woman is being targeted or abused or harassed at work the “party line” is that it was clearly consensual or that she can’t take a joke, or that “she’s too sensitive”. When it’s an underage girl, they STILL claim it was consensual, or somehow OK because she looked 16 even though she’s 12 (as if 16 is ok). When it’s someone conventionally attractive, she’s “dressing to attract” but when she’s not attractive, it’s “she loved the attention”.
Honestly, women can’t win. Our President tells a prominent journalist to smile more, which is the advice that millions of successful women have been hearing for 50 years. The whole thing is disgusting from start to finish. And the drip drip drip makes it worse. Every single day there’s more. And if I hear one more time “It was different back then” I’m going to scream. No, it wasn’t different. It was just that nobody was listening. The cops told women “why don’t you take a few days to think it over before filing a police report”. If there was physical evidence, it would be long gone by then.
24 Likes