I wish to add two other possible factors as to why Michael Jackson is grosser than Roman Polanski:
- Let's face it; we all already had an image of MJ doing things with much younger boys than 12. The reason for the over 14/under 14 dichotomy in the law is our fear that sexual abuse "sexualizes" prepubescent kids. So we read in the paper that MJ got busted with a 12 year old, but the mental image is of him surrounded by much younger tykes, thanks to his many publicity photos of the same, and the younger we imagine them, the more the squickiness approaches infinity like a hyperbola approaches an asymptote. He's being tried in our minds for crimes different from the one for which he's charged. Polanski is known to have assaulted only one, and we don't imagine a crowd of second graders with similar stories.
- Polanski slept with a girl, as other have noted. Thus, what he did to her didn't change her fundamentally; it just accelerated the inevitable. Not so with a man fondling a boy. For God's sake, he might have made that boy a homo. From Biblical times to the 19th century, Polanski would have been forced to marry his victim. MJ would have been burned alive.
I wish to note that I agree with neither of the above analyses, especially the second. I merely submit that they play a role in the public's unconscious distinction between the two cases.
