With exhausted effort, I bring you, ladies and gentlemen, Woody Allen’s defense of Polanski – as given in an interview at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.

“It’s something that happened many years ago…. He has suffered,” Allen told French radio station RTL. “He’s an artist, he’s a nice person, he did something wrong and he paid for it. They [his critics] are not happy unless he pays the rest of his life. They would be happy if they could execute him in a firing squad,” he said.

Yawn. What more could we really expect from Woody “I Basically Married My Stepdaughter” Allen? And no, I DON’T care that he was never “technically” the stepfather of then-wife Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi. It’s still creepy and gross.

(Many thanks to William for bringing this to my attention on Twitter.)