It’s difficult to adjudicate such cases on our own and outsourcing the job to Twitter or the media often means replacing mob justice with actual justice.

So how about this? Let’s be a little more French.

Not so French that we celebrate the likes of Polanski, but French enough that we lean toward separating the artist from the art. …

There are obvious cases, like Polanksi, who deserve public shaming—he admitted to the crime, but fled instead of doing the time. But what to do about Depp and Heard?

[This is tougher than it looks, especially when the artist is still around to profit commercially from the art — which is most true with film, TV, and music. That was enough to torpedo more than one film with Kevin Spacey as well as push him out of “House of Cards.” Catholic parishes have a similar debate over the use of prolific and popular hymn composer David Haas, whose work was nearly ubiquitous until dozens of women came forward a few years ago to accuse him of sexual assault, grooming underage girls for sex and in some cases “forcing sexual contact.” That has led many Catholic parishes and dioceses to stop playing any of his compositions and publishers to end their relationships with them. And while we can debate whether the art transcends the composer, the real issue for people in the pews is that they don’t want to hear “Blest Are They” in the middle of Mass and have to think about Haas, no matter how good the composition is.

There are always other hymns. There are also plenty of other films and TV shows. — Ed]