"Celebrities would just be fools/ To play by little people’s rules."

The verse of Calvin Trillin takes on a bitingly ironic cast when the Deadline Poet waxes poetic about…Roman Polanski:

For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He’s suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?

He only raped a single child.

Megan Garber is an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. She was formerly a CJR staff writer.