While thinking that over, Wendy Long has an open letter to Whoopi Goldberg asking some of the tough questions that ABC should be asking of its star. An excerpt:

Your audience is filled with women who need and deserve the empowerment potential in a show like yours. Cultural values are created, in part, through the dissemination of ideas. You had a chance to explain to millions of people why the personal autonomy, bodily integrity and liberty of all women and children is at stake when even one rapist is not held accountable for his actions.
At a minimum, you could have explained how backward we really are in this country – and how the epidemic of rape and child sex abuse serves as a kind of domestic terrorism that interferes with the freedom of millions of people who are affected by the disproportionate failure of our legal system to redress sexual violence. According to a study submitted to Congress in support of the Violence Against Women Act in the 1990s, by then Sen. Joseph Biden, only 2 percent of rapists spend even one day behind bars. Violence against women and children is grossly under-reported and under-prosecuted, and the data consistently shows that crimes against property are punished much more harshly than crimes against female bodies.
Rather than highlight this profound and pervasive injustice, you bemoaned the fact that Mr. Polanski was compelled to flee the United States after pleading guilty to child rape because he was about to go to jail for “a hundred years.”
Many people would argue he deserved such a sentence, and under California law today but not back then, drugging and raping a child would expose Mr. Polanski to a mandatory minimum term of 25 years behind bars. But because he was allowed to plead guilty to only one of six felonies with which he was originally charged – he faced no more than four years behind bars, and some reports say the judge intended to impose a sentence of only a few weeks of incarceration.
Mr. Polanski arrogantly decided that he shouldn’t spend any time in jail, and he fled this country spinelessly for a nation he knew would not extradite him for his crime. If it’s true, as has been reported, that he took off because he thought it was unfair that he should go to jail after his lawyer worked out a “no jail” deal with the prosecutor, he had a right to withdraw his guilty plea and go to TRIAL – not PARIS.
That Mr. Polanski would show such disrespect for this country’s legal system is a reason to punish him MORE, not less, for his crime. It may be a decades-old case, but it bears stating the obvious, that the law should not reward fugitives for their successful efforts to evade justice.