Hollywood Awards Accused Child Abuser and Elmo Actor With Three Emmys; Media Sees No Problem
JUNE 27, 2013 BY THEMEDIAREPORT.COM
Kevin Clash (with Elmo) joins the Hollywood abuse club with Michael Jackson and Roman Polanski
How do the cultural elites in Hollywood deal with a successful actor after he has been accused by at least four different men of child sex abuse? Not screaming headlines, of course. Instead, it rewards him with three Emmy Awards.
Kevin Clash struck it big in Hollywood by developing the personality and voice of the popular Sesame Street character Elmo. Yet after a number of men came forward late last November to accuse him of abusing them as boys, he resigned from the hit children’s show, thus joining a growing list of Hollywood celebrities accused of sex abuse with scant media disapprobation.
Roman Polanski: ‘It wasn’t rape-rape’
Clash is not the first Hollywood star to be celebrated by media elites even after being accused of child sex crimes.
In March of 1977, Los Angeles law enforcement arrested famed director Roman Polanski for the savage rape of a 13-year-old girl that happened at the home of his famous friend, Jack Nicholson. Court records indicate that after Polanski plied the underage girl with alcohol and drugs, he then forcibly performed oral sex, intercourse, and sodomy.
Polanski never denied the crimes. In fact, he told an interviewer a short time later, in 1979, “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But f—ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f— young girls. Juries want to f— young girls. Everyone wants to f— young girls!”
Yet through it all, Polanski, the admitted child rapist, continued to have a successful and celebrated filmmaking career, with Hollywood ultimately bestowing its highest honor, an Oscar award, for Best Director for his work on The Pianist (2002).
It seems that child sex abuse can be good for one’s career in Hollywood.
And, shockingly, several high-profile media figures have actually jumped to Polanski’s defense. Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Debra Winger were reportedly among the list of over 100 Hollywood figures who demanded Polanski’s release. On a CNN interview, Tom O’Neill, senior editor of the celebrity magazine In Touch Weekly, cried, “It’s mind boggling why they’re still pursuing this … It just seems that the prosecutors in Los Angeles won’t let go these many years later.”
On the nationally syndicated television show The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg downplayed Polanski’s rape of a 13-year-old girl. “It wasn’t rape-rape,” she claimed. “We’re (the United States) a different kind of society. We see things differently. The world sees 13 year olds and 14 year olds – in the rest of Europe, they are seen, often times [as adults].”
And Tom Shales, television critic for the Washington Post, opined, “[I]t may sound like a hollow defense, but in Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old.