A radio interview with Django Unchained director Quentin Tarantino has garnered the already controversial director some well-deserved backlash.

During a 2003 conversation with Howard Stern, Tarantino gave his input on the unforgivable scandal which has followed French-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski. The director and fugitive drugged and raped 13-year-old Samantha Geimer in 1977.

“He didn’t rape a 13-year-old,” the Kill Bill creator told the Sirius XM radio host. “It was statutory rape. That’s not quite the same thing. … 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…Throwing the word ‘rape’ around is like throwing the word ‘racist’ around,” he continued. “It doesn’t apply to everything that people use it for.”

When one of Stern’s co-hosts chimed in, adding the young girl did not want to be sexually violated by Polanski, he responded with: “she wanted to have it.”
He later added the young girl was “down to party with Roman.” When Stern asked Tarantino to consider Geimer was drugged by Roman and given alcohol, he still didn’t change his tune.
After pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, Polanski fled the United States before his sentencing in 1978. Since then, four other women have accused the 84-year-old director of sexually assaulting them when they were children.
Prior to the resurfacing of the interview, Tarantino has long been a questionable figure among Black filmmakers like Spike Lee for his use of the n-word in some of his films.