I missed Steven Mikulan‘s 12.23 Wrap story that claimed the evil Polish dwarf is almost out of the woods regarding that 31 year-old unlawful sexual conduct beef. So much anti-Polanski hate and vitriol was expended on this site last September by the pitchforkers that it seems appropriate to address it again before the year concludes. Nothing is over until it’s over, of course, but if I were a pitchforker…

“The most important news about Roman Polanski has been nearly lost in the swirl of stories this week about the state appellate court’s rejection of his motion to dismiss the 32-year-old rape charges against him,” Miklulan wrote.

“It’s almost all over. Polanski is nearly home free.

“In rejecting the case, the court of appeal also strongly suggested that the Superior Court release the auteur on the basis of the time he’s already served behind bars.

“As TheWrap reported Monday, the court suggested that he can remedy his plight by formally requesting L.A. Superior Court Judge Peter Espinoza to hand down his sentence in absentia. That would then allow Espinoza to sentence Polanski to the time he’s already served in two jails – the 42-day stretch in Chino back in 1977, and the recent 70-day staycation in a jail near Zurich.

“Bingo: get out of jail, and out from under a three-decade-long cloud of scandal.

“What’s not been measured yet is how foolish District Attorney Steve Cooley will look before all the winking and nodding is over in this messy, sordid case.

“Had he not forced the issue by re-issuing a warrant for Polanski’s arrest, none of this would have happened. And Cooley probably made that move because, as legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin recently wrote in the New Yorker, Cooley only moved to have Polanski arrested by Swiss authorities last September “because [Polanski] seemed to have a real possibility of winning in the courts.”

“Now an appeals court has drawn the director a map out of the legal maze he’s been in.

“To be fair, Cooley has only been working with the disastrous case that was left to him by the late Judge Laurence Rittenband, a publicity-seeking jurist who, in 1977 and 1978, attempted to stage-manage the public actions of Polanski’s attorney and prosecutor as though they were actors in a dinner-theater production.”

Remember all that ugliness three months ago? “There seems to be something almost fetishistic about this case for some people,” I wrote at the time. “A weirdly lopsided and enduring sense of vengeance that the haters feel a need to pursue. There’s something oddly primal going on here. Some kind of metaphor they’re reading into it.”

I’m not trying to tweak the haters but Mikulan did report what he reported and things do seem to have gone Polanski’s way. What are they feeling about this? All that pent-up rage stretching back three-plus-decades and hater justice coming so close, and then phfffft…what happened?

I wonder what Polanski getting a get-out-of-jail card and avoiding extradition (if and when this finally happens) will do to Marina Zenovich‘s Polanski-doc sequel? She was in Switzerland and on the case just after the arrest happened three months ago. It would have been much more dramatic for the film’s purposes if RP had been flown back to the States and had faced whatever awaited.