Even across the pond, L.A. makes news

My plan for vacation was to tune out entirely. No e-mail, no phone calls, no thoughts of work for two weeks. But when you live in Los Angeles, you can never really leave.

In England, I opened a newspaper and saw a mocking column asking how L.A. could dare send a poor, sobbing Lindsay Lohan to jail for blowing off rehab and violating probation. Hey, doesn’t Britain have enough of its own judges to insult without picking fights from across the pond with ours?

In France, I opened a newspaper and read that the Dodgers had paid $400,000 to a team honcho out of their Dream Foundation charity. I also read that the sons of divorcing owners Frank and Jamie McCourt — who paid no income taxes on more than $100 million in income over five years — had been paid $600,000 salaries despite the fact that one was in graduate school and the other had another job.

Next up was a story about the arrest of a former city sanitation worker, who was charged with 10 counts of murder in the Grim Sleeper serial killings. My guess is that he’ll probably still collect a city pension. But before I could process any of that, a hotel guest in France, also from California, asked if I’d heard about the earthquake in Los Angeles.

What, no tsunami?

Instead of enjoying my break, I had columns running through my head the whole time I was away from Los Angeles. Flying back home, I decided I should call the McCourts’ tax lawyers because I’m sure they could help me figure out a way to write off the whole vacation, if not get a tax-free refund. Or maybe I could replace the guy the McCourts hired to send positive energy to the Dodgers from his home in Boston.

Then Monday morning I rolled out of bed in a jet-lagged fog, turned on my computer to check the news, and saw that the Swiss government had decided not to extradite Roman Polanski for having sex with a child in Jack Nicholson’s house many years ago, explaining the decision with a raft of legal mumbo jumbo.

That got the old juices going. I’d missed a few waves while abroad, but another swell had come in. And by the time I had quickly tapped out a column on Polanski for The Times’ website and rolled into the office, another big one had crashed ashore.

Actor/director/humanitarian Mel Gibson had gone “Mad Max” on his girlfriend, Oksana Grigorieva, and the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department was looking into whether he’d also used her as a punching bag.

The south of France has much to recommend it, I can say from recent experience. But for a news junkie, there’s just no place like Los Angeles. Things never really slow down much around here. Our state may be cracked from head to toe, and it may be nearly bankrupt, but it is never dull.

I couldn’t wait to jump on the Polanski story, having dug into the case last year to refresh my memory after the Oscar winner was nabbed in Switzerland. Sure, there was some confusion back in 1978 about a deal Polanski thought he had cut with attorneys and the judge. And the victim has said she’d rather let the whole thing finally die.

But legal wrangling aside, this was the story of an influential and connected man who, in his 40s, had illegal sex with a child, spent 42 days in lockup for “observation,” and then fled the country without having been sentenced.

And last year, while Polanski’s cheerleading squad — which included Debra Winger, Harvey Weinstein, Martin Scorsese, Whoopi Goldberg and Woody Allen, among others — was leading the call for his release, I was reading about how Polanski allegedly plied his victim with alcohol and drugs and talked her out of her clothes.

It made me think that instead of lambasting prosecutors for persecuting Polanski for his “so-called crime,” Weinstein might benefit from reading the victim’s testimony, in which she said Polanski switched to anal sex after she told him she wasn’t on the pill. On numerous occasions, she said, she made it clear she wanted him to stop, in part because she was afraid of him.

You may recall that Goldberg said in an interview last year that it wasn’t “rape-rape,” whatever that means. Goldberg popped up again Tuesday to say that Gibson — who made anti-Semitic remarks in 2006 and in his latest flare-up allegedly used racial slurs against blacks and Latinos — is not a racist.

Thank you, Whoopi. But wouldn’t you say that at the very least, the devout Catholic who made “The Passion of the Christ,” should stop in at the nearest confession box?

The website Radar Online gets the credit, if you will, for breaking the latest Gibson story, with new tapes of his recorded conversations with Grigorieva released every few hours. If I were handling PR for Gibson, I’d tell him to claim he was doing a reading for a sequel to “Braveheart,” in which his Scottish rebel, William Wallace, works himself into a fury over the evil ways of Edward the Longshanks.

I think it would work.

You need a bat in the side of the head, Longshanks. All right? How about that? You look like a pig in heat. I’ll put you in a rose garden, Longshanks. You understand that? Because I’m capable of it.

Now that he’s a free man, Polanski could direct.

Oh, my. Vanity, greed, wrath, lust.

It’s good to be home.

steve.lopez@latimes.com