Quentin Tarantino Once Argued Roman Polanski Didn’t Rape 13-Year-Old Victim Because She ‘Wanted to Have It’

Quentin Tarantino Once Argued Roman Polanski Didn't Rape 13-Year-Old Victim Because She 'Wanted to Have It'

The "Kill Bill" director also responds to Uma Thurman's claims he bullied her into driving the car that led to serious injuries.

Quentin Tarantino could be facing backlash any minute now for a 2003 Howard Stern, in which the filmmaker argued Roman Polanski's 13-year-old statutory rape victim "wanted to have it."

Just one day after he expressed regret over Uma Thurman's serious "Kill Bill" injuries, the interview resurfaced and it doesn't paint Tarantino in a very positive light.

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"It was statutory rape. That’s not quite the same thing," Tarantino tried to explain to a baffled Stern. "He had sex with a minor, all right. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violent, throwing them down — It's one of the most violent crimes in the world."

Tarantino further tried to say that everyone was trying to apply American morals to the situation. Polanski was found guilty of statutory rape with a minor over the incident in 1977. He fled the country before sentencing and continues to live overseas.

When Stern suggested that you should know it's wrong to have sex with a 13-year-old girl, Tarantino retorted, "Look, she was down with it." He claims that the girl changed her story to rape because she got in trouble with her mother, citing that Polanski tells the story differently in his book.

When Stern's sidekick, Robin Quivers, said the minor was subjected to sex "she didn't want to have," Tarantino shot back, "No, that was not the case at all. She wanted to have it and dated the guy."

Stern backed Quivers and declared, "Any time a person is 13 and an adult has sex with them, I believe that's rape."

"I don't believe that's rape, I believe it's against the law," Tarantino countered. "Not for these 13-year-old party girls."

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Ultimately, Tarantino did concede that the situation was wrong and that Polanski should have shut it down. "The only thing I'm having a problem with is using super-big buzz words that don't quite apply to the situation." Tarantino has yet to respond to this audio making the rounds again.

The troubling dialogue resurfaced less than 24 hours after Tarantino responded to Uma Thurman's charges that he had bullied her into driving the car that wrecked, causing her serious knee and neck injuries, during the filming of "Kill Bill." Thurman alleged that Tarantino yelled at her, spit on her and even choked her at one point during the process, bullying her into driving the car despite her protests.

"I am guilty, for putting her in that car, but not the way that people are saying I am guilty of it," Tarantino told Deadline. "It’s the biggest regret of my life, getting her to do that stunt."

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He said he drove the same stretch of road and found it to be a simple straight line, so he was confident she could do it. When it came time to film, though, they opted to drive it the other way. He erroneously assumed it would be as simple that way, but it wasn't.

"I thought, a straight road is a straight road and I didn’t think I needed to run the road again to make sure there wasn’t any difference, going in the opposite direction. Again, that is one of the biggest regrets of my life. As a director, you learn things and sometimes you learn them through horrendous mistakes. That was one of my most horrendous mistakes, that I didn’t take the time to run the road, one more time, just to see what I would see."

As for the spitting and choking, Tarantino said those were not quotes attributed to Thurman. He credited those to the writer of the New York Times article, who failed to understand that those events happened as part of filming the movie with Thurman's total consent and comfort considered throughout. The director said he and Thurman have since talked out their differences over the car sequence and rekindled their friendship.

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