Why is Roman Polanski’s arrest such a cause celebre? I’m not an expert on the case, but I have read the grand jury testimony of Polanski’s thirteen-year-old victim, and it is pretty convincing and pretty damning. I understand that Samantha Geimer (then Samantha Gailey) publicly requested leniency for Roman Polanski, in the hopes that he could collect his big deal Oscar and she and her family could avoid the pain of being bothered again about something which was now decades in the past.

A lot of people seem to think that the intervening decades Roman Polanski spent in France were some kind of hardship equivalent to prison. First of all, Roman Polanski was a filmmaker in Poland in the 1950’s, but he left for France and then began making movies in the UK in the 1960’s. So the fact that he was making movies in the United States in the 1970’s does not mean that it was a hardship for him to then go make movies in another country. That was something he tended to switch up anyway. And he fled to France allegedly because he thought there was a chance that, instead of just getting the 42 days of time served, the judge might sentence him to a whole 90 days, minus the 42, for a total of 48 days behind bars.

What does anyone think the punishment would be today for a 43-year-old man who got a 13-year-old girl alone, plied her with booze, and then just brought her home after speaking about inappropriate subjects with her. Now add illegal drugs, forced sex, and introducing the girl to her very first anal rape. A new commission of a crime like this would get a long sentence of the sort where he might be killed by fellow inmates.

I understand that Roman Polanski has managed to achieve some great things in the face of horrific hardships. He lost his mother to the Holocaust and he lost his wife to Charles Manson and The Family committing the Tate-LaBianca murders. His wife was his eight months pregnant actress wife Sharon Tate. I do think it makes sense to consider how many forty somethings anally rape junior high school kids without having also had hard lives themselves.

But he still managed to direct Chinatown, a movie about California’s shady water rights history, and make it an interesting noir. Then again, Chinatown also benefited from the talents of the brilliant writer Robert Towne on the job and two actors widely considered to be some of the best of both their own generation and many others, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It is generally agreed that Roman Polanski got into such heated debates with Faye Dunaway on set that he even pulled out pieces of her hair. So, not a stranger to violence against women.

A lot of people, who aren’t me, also liked Rosemary’s Baby, so I accept that was an accomplishment, even though not entertaining to me. And a lot of people found The Pianist very poignant. The Pianist could have been from the heart or the tale of the talented Jewish musician trying to continue to create under the shadow of the Third Reich could have been a cynical ploy to get an Oscar and get to be self-righteous about not being able to come to the Academy Awards because of fear of arrest.

I’ve lived in Europe and most Europeans agree that France is a wonderful place to live. In point of fact, the Germans have invaded France every chance they got throughout history in pursuit of the best living. Hence the German expression for the best the world has to offer: Leben wie Gott in Frankreich. Roman Polanski has been married to the beautiful actress/rocker chick Emmanuelle Seigner since apparently 1989, when she was twenty-three. Or, to put in another way, there are even more years between her age and Polanski’s than between him and his 1977 victim. But it’s just different when you go after a twenty-three-year-old versus a thirteen-year-old.

So Roman Polanski’s big hardship is that, he couldn’t serve 48 more days in the loony bin ward of the prison (not the main population) and this meant that it is now, thirty some years later, terribly inconvenient for him to go to all the galas honoring him and his achievements. He was arrested on his way to receive a special award at a Zurich film festival when he was detained by Swiss authorities, who are perhaps less sexually open-minded than the French.

It honestly strikes me that Roman Polanski was going to get just a slap on the wrist for a pretty serious acquaintance assault because people felt sorry for him for having had bad things happen to him and maybe enjoyed his work. It seems like he might have gotten at least a few of his awards for the same reason because it seems peculiar that Americans go on and on about his greatness as a filmmaker without being able to name ten things he has done.

And does good art entirely excuse really bad behavior?

Is it likely that a bleach blonde with fake tits who worked for Playboy appeared in a Playboy pictorial? Is it likely that a millionaire reality show contestant would murder his bleach blonde girlfriend and think he was going to get away with it by chopping off all her fingers and pulling out all her teeth but not removing her serial numbered breast implants? Is it likely that, if someone were so horribly cruelly disfigured, either just prior to being murdered or post-mortem to incompetently prevent identification, that TMZ would buy a death photo from someone in the coroner’s office and post it on the internet? Well, the only part of the the Jasmine-Fiore-murder-followed-by-death-photo story being reported which is not true is that the victim posed for Playboy. Full disclosure: Jasmine Fiore may have had a bit part in the horror movie The Abandoned which was an advertiser on this site and others I work on, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t bias me on this. I’m pretty sure I would find this story simultaneously ghoulishly hilarious and horrifically tragic regardless.

One Ryan Alexander Jenkins was indeed thwarted when one Jasmine Fiore was identified by the serial number on her breast implants. Apparently Ryan Alexander Jenkins recently finished taping on VH1’s I Love Money 3. I don’t really know what that show is about and I can’t imagine the prize dollars are anything significant to anyone already a millionaire, but I can’t quite bring myself to look it up either. Gawker’s Jezebel reports that, since Ryan Alexander Jenkins became a person of interest in the murder of Jasmine Fiore, VH1 has pulled all mention of the Megan Wants a Millionaire show he was a finalist on. Jezebel further reports that the murder suspect may have actually won the grand prize on I Love Money 3. Jezebel goes on to commend VH1 for their sensitivity in removing the MWAM content from the VH1 web site (juicy bits helpfully archived by Jezebel.)

I have also never seen Megan Wants a Millionaire, which was apparently canceled fairly early in its run. A while back I covered the Charm School reunion show where Sharon Osbourne and this Megan Hauserman ditzy blonde self-professed gold-digger got into a cat fight, although I admit I’ve never seen Charm School and only watched the cat fight vid on the VH1 web site when it became a hot topic.

At that time, Megan’s claim to fame was that Poison frontman/insecure meanie/embarrassment-to-aging-rockers-everywhere Bret Michaels rejected her on Rock of Love. Is being rejected by a guy who was okay-looking in 1986 really a resume item? Apparently so, as Megan Hauserman was given her own show Megan Wants a Millionaire. The Superficial reports, “You know what the most fucked up part of this story is? There’s a reality show where millionaires compete for the love of a self-proclaimed gold-digger with fake breasts. That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all day.”

It seems that, immediately after being rejected by Megan Hauserman on camera for VH1 in March, Ryan Alexander Jenkins went to Vegas and married his girlfriend of some time Jasmine Fiore. Wouldn’t you be pissed if your significant other went on television to humiliate themselves pursuing someone who is not you? Certainly would not spell wedding bells to me. According to Jasmine Fiore’s understandably bereaved and distraught mother Lisa Lepore, Jasmine Fiore had the marriage annulled in May, but law enforcement can find no record of this. One Robert Hasman got a series of text messages from his ex-girlfriend Jasmine Fiore over the two days before her death. Then he got just one cryptic message, well after her estimated time of death, which just read “suck it“. In other post-mortem commentary news, What Would Tyler Durden Do reports, “Jasmines roommate says their relationship was “on the rocks”. She also said that Jenkins told her he was “done with the relationship” and that “he couldn’t take it anymore”. This was one day after Jasmine was found in a dumpster . . . She’s not very attractive, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill her. Legally, I mean.”

Ryan Alexander Jenkins is Canadian and is believed to have fled to Canada, although his father, a wealthy architect, developed a resort on an island in Honduras and owns at least one plane. The Huffington Post reports that Canada has agreed to extradite Ryan Alexander Jenkins if he is apprehended in Canada because the State of California has promised not to pursue the death penalty in this potentially capital crime.

Judging from video of Ryan Alexander Jenkins singing “I love my wife” to Jasmine Fiore in Vegas which he posted to his MySpace page (and TMZ helpfully archived), Jasmine Fiore was brunette at the time of her death. So bleached blonde and naked for Playboy = false. All the ridiculous stuff (including VH1 choosing not to profit from tragedy) = totally true.

Director Ramzi Abed’s film The Devil’s Muse was released on DVD by Halo 8 last week. Ramzi Abed and I have corresponded for years. We finally met in person when we were both exhibiting at the Erotica LA convention.

In a surreal twist, I invited Ramzi to dinner with a few other cool creative people I know a couple days ago and it turned out that he and high end party planner Sabrina actually went to university together. I didn’t know this until we were literally walking into the restaurant. I guess I just have really specific taste in pals.

The Devil’s Muse is about everyone’s favorite unsolved Hollywood crime, the Black Dahlia murder. In case you are morbid enough to be reading this, yet not morbid enough to be familiar with this investigation, I’ll give you the quick overview. Elizabeth Short was a 1940’s starlet wannabe, who was good-looking, a snappy dresser, popular with the gents, and whose tortured corpse was found literally cut in half. Her murder remains one of the most intriguing cold cases of all time.

Ramzi Abed says, his goal was:

“to do a feminist version of the Italian Giallo genre of violent erotic thrillers, but only to subvert the sexuality and violence to showcase Hollywood’s objectification of women. [He] also mixed in real and exaggerated documentary footage into the scripted film, to further create a reality television feeling to alternately confuse and guide audiences further.”

You can decide for yourself now, as Ramzi Abed’s movie is now available via Netflix, Amazon, or Halo 8’s Merch Lackey store.

Like a lot of people, I went through a brief phase where I read various serial killer books. I never got the whole thing of glorifying serial killers, however, as most of the real life variety appear to be enormous losers. The serial killer concept is of someone who is empowered, but actual serial killers tend to be anything but empowered. Nonetheless, I did read a number of the novels with fictionalized murderers and liked some okay. I’m uncomfortable with bad things happening to good people, so this somewhat limits my ability to enjoy the genre. I read A. J. Holt’s Watch Me, found it absolutely delicious and unexpected, and pretty much stopped picking up that variety of thriller.

I’ve got a soft spot for whatever the term will eventually be for long-form cable television shows which emphasize quality, character, and complex story lines. So I gave Showtime’s Dexter a chance. If you have not caught this terribly fun show yet, I’ll give the overview without spoilers. In the first season, we meet Dexter Morgan, whose day job is blood spatter forensics for the Miami PD and whose nighttime avocation is meeting out justice. In the second season, we see what happens when there is a romantic triangle featuring a nice girl who knows nothing of Dexter’s hobby and a crazy bad girl who would not mind dating a killer.

The dialog is snappy and the story lines are very tidy and satisfying. Among other things, the show explores themes of alienation. The scenes are darkly hilarious where Dexter, while thinking very abnormal thoughts, fits in fine at his normal job with normal fuckin’ people. Michael C. Hall, best known for his portrayal of David Fisher on Six Feet Under, plays Dexter Morgan with beautiful nuances where he comes across as simultaneous milquetoast normal and very disturbingly creepy. The viewer is tempted to write off his vigilantism as virtue, but the problem with that is Dexter’s monstrous pleasure in torture-killing strangers. It is a show which manages to be both a lot of fun and food for thought. Plus it somehow strikes a balance where the gore and violence are neither phony nor unbearably grisly, which no mean feat, given the subject matter.

If you would like to see the first episode of Season 3 of Dexter for free two weeks before it airs the end of the month, you can go to this special Blue Blood Dexter preview link, press Watch Now, and enter the password Lady Killers when prompted.

Tim Faulker at ValleyWag summed up the Hans Reiser trial best, saying, “There’s nothing funny about a murder trial. Unless there is.”

It has been a while since we did any sex trial coverage at Blue Blood, so I guess we’re due. So here is the set-up. Hans Reiser is a well-known but unpopular Linux programmer. Well, he is probably a Linux programmer, but there are bitchy San Francisco tech scene rumors that he actually hired cheap Eastern Bloc coders to do all his work for him. At any rate, there are some Linux file systems which bear his name, whether or not he earned it. And, let’s face it, the SF tech world has a rich history of dudes who take credit for other people’s work. I don’t think most of those people are murderers, so that is not, in and of itself, damning in a murder trial. Given that Hans Reiser went off to college after 8th grade, I’m thinking he probably at least supervised his Russian coding teams. I’d say that he was not on trial for whether he deserved his personal kudos, but he actually kind of was. His attorneys William DuBois and Richard Tamor repeatedly alleged that Han Reiser was only on trial because people hated his personality so much. Heck, his lawyers pointed out that they couldn’t stand the guy. I’m not sure whether I’d choose to be represented by counsel who disliked me so intensely, but Hans Reiser admits he is a little iffy in his choices on who to associate with.

Apparently, whether or not one wishes to mail order, Russia has bride catalogs where marriage-minded gentlemen can flip through and select the woman of their dreams. Hans Reiser started dating one Nina Sharanova who promptly became pregnant. Hans Reiser’s father, Ramon Reiser, told him that he should not marry the woman, partly because Hans says Nina conceived on their first night together and she was an OB/GYN by training and he felt a gynecological doctor could have practiced proper birth control, if she wanted to. Once Hans and Nina tied the knot, Ramon Reiser suspected his son’s Russian bride of using her new CFO position in the company to embezzle funds.

A gentleman named Sean Sturgeon was the Maid of Honor at the Reiser/Sharanova wedding and dressed in drag for the occasion. Sean Sturgeon was a childhood friend of Hans Reiser’s and loaned him the proceeds of a mortgage on his condo when Reiser’s company Namesys could not make payroll, possibly due to Nina’s embezzling. Sean Sturgeon and Nina Reiser do ecstasy together and Nina is irritated when Hans Reiser refuses to do it with her. According to endless court documents, Sean Sturgeon and Nina Reiser began a sexual affair which included lots of BDSM sex.

Hans Reiser accused Sean Sturgeon of everything under the sun. He said he didn’t need to pay his childhood friend back the bridge loan he had received. He said the man had MPD. Although he knew about the affair for three years before going into divorce proceedings, he said he was really concerned about the drugs and sadomasochism involved in his wife’s relationship with Sean Sturgeon. Why can’t San Francisco people ever just admit to plain old-fashioned jealousy? They always have to complicate the issue. You have to love legal papers which include the phrase, “lewd tattooed drug addicted BDSM pimp/whore” to describe someone’s oldest friend. Hans Reiser’s court filings made much of Sean Sturgeon having carved the word rage into his arm. Sean Sturgeon dismisses the incident, pointing out that Hans saw him cut himself at the time and it happened in the mid-90’s when lots of people were doing that sort of body modification where they lived.

The court documents in the custody battle also included the entertaining query, “Should the government be keeping me from showing my son how to direct brave goblin suicide bombers against their elven oppressors?” Apparently Nina had been freaking out at Hans for some time about playing Battlefield Vietnam and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic with their young son Rory. Hans Reiser had well-reasoned thoughts on which games he allowed his son to play. For example, he felt that a game like Grand Theft Auto was unsuitable because there were no penalties for killing innocents. More creepily, he seemed to feel that it was important for a boy to develop his killer instincts and that these video games would assist with this and prevent the child from otherwise being made soft by his upscale suburban surroundings.

After Hans Reiser and Nina Reiser split up, she had a relationship with Sean Sturgeon for a while and told him that wolves mate for life and he was her wolf. A bitter custody dispute over the Reiser children Rory and Nio left Nina with primary custody and, after wholly-unsubstantiated and somewhat doctor-disproved accusations of sexual child abuse, Sean Sturgeon was not allowed to visit her when her kids were around. Eventually Nina and Sean mostly broke up, although Sean continued to give her occasional financial support and drove around with a decal of two wolves pathetically on the back of his car. For her part, Nina started a relationship with Anthony Zografos, a potentially richer dude who appeared more suited to raising a family.

Now this is the point where it would have just been a San Francisco divorce, had things stopped here. We could all have shaken our heads in dismay at the way the court system responds to reports of things we consider normal and commonplace, such as body mods or kinky sex or violent video games. Only things did not stop there. On Labor Day of 2006, Nina Reiser disappeared. Although no body was found and phone records show that Hans Reiser tried to call his ex days after her disappearance, the husband is always the first one police look at. He was arrested and held without bail for the past two years. That is a long time to be behind bars when the authorities can’t even produce the corpse. Law enforcement’s strongest pieces of evidence were very small amounts of sloppily-processed DNA evidence found in places where it really could have gotten there a number of ways and the fact that Hans Reiser had purchased two murder-related books in the week following his wife’s disappearance. The books were David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and Jonathan Goodman’s (no relation to Judge Larry Goodman) Masterpieces of Murder. I’ve never read either book, but, heck, I’ve watched every single episode of the Homicide: Life on the Streets TV show, as well as David Simon’s The Wire and Generation Kill. Seems like flimsy evidence. Especially when one considers that Rory and Nio’s grandmother spirited them off to Russia and there were questions of whether she would let them come back to the States to testify. Hans Reiser asserted that Nina Reiser, possibly abetted by a lover, stole from his company and then went home to Russia and had her mother bring her kids to her to neatly solve their custody dispute. Just to add to the confusion, in the middle of the proceedings, Sean Sturgeon confessed to being a serial killer. He placed his victim count at eight and a half because he was not sure whether the ninth victim had died or not. He swore, however, that he loved Nina and only murdered people who abused him as a child and was willing to take a polygraph or “truth serum” to prove his honesty.

The State of California felt there was enough to hold Hans Reiser on, but also felt that it was going to be a difficult trial and a long one with great expense to the taxpayers. So Hans Reiser was offered a plea bargain. The deal was that he would confess to killing Nina, tell them how he did it and show where he hid the body, so her loved ones could get closure. In return he would get three years with credit for time served while awaiting trial. He turned down the plea and a jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to 25 years to life. His attorney’s went around saying essentially that they were not allowed to introduce proper evidence that Nina Reiser was a dirty slut and that their client was just railroaded because he was such a thoroughly unlikable dickhead.

A lot of people in the open source community felt that Hans Reiser got a really raw deal. Sean Sturgeon swears he murdered eight or nine people and the police do not even arrest him, because there are no bodies. Hans Reiser swears he did not murder one person and is convicted, even though there is no body. Seems wrong.

Only this week, Hans Reiser made a new deal with Judge Larry Goodman to change his sentence to 15 years to life. Then he lead investigators to where he had deeply buried his wife’s body and gave a detailed account of how he punched her and then cut off the blood flow to her brain until she was dead. The only embarrassment he shows in his sworn testimony is that he felt he used a somewhat amateurish chokehold to kill her and that his old martial arts instructors might be disappointed in his murder technique. Doh!

“This is the typical behavior of a socialist, atheistic Open Source developer. When one has a lack of respect for intellectual property and God, then murder is sure to follow.”
–TurkBack, Wired

Blue Blood and Gothic.net would like to bring you all the opportunity to win a screening of the Rob Zombie re-imagining of one of the original gangsters of slasher flicks, Halloween. The grand prize is a screening of the film for the winner and twenty of their most intimate friends, as well as a Rob Zombie grab bag including a limited edition T-shirt, CD’s, the Devil’s Rejects DVD, and the House of 1000 Corpses DVD. Four runners up will also win their own grab bags.

You know how sometimes you and your friends like to smear yourselves with vanilla-flavored corn syrup with a lot of red food coloring in it and take pictures? Well, if you are familiar with the Halloween series, go ahead, bust out those mask and knife collectibles, and take the most Halloween iconic shots you can and submit them over at the Rob Zombie’s Halloween Contest site to win.

Fine print: real murders void eligibility to participate.

Amelia’s Blue Blood Quote for Today: Murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle.