I think this conversation is going in a weird direction - how we should treat and think of art created by people who were very bad in some way is a long standing question and people have a lot of different ideas about it. And many find any of the possible solutions dissatisfying. It's not an odd conversation and I think it often can be helpful to discuss things like this in order to put our thoughts in order or we may discover things we hadn't thought of.
There are a few points that strike me:
It seems clear that being a shit is not incompatible with being a great artist, not only technically, but in terms of feeling and insight. I think most people are comfortable with the first part of that statement but not so much the second. It seems wrong that someone can have the sensitivity or insight to create the greatest artworks and also be capable of considered evil. Maybe that is in itself an important insight to have though, and it seems to be one we want at times to wash out or cover up.
Usually this problem is much easier with regard to people who lived in the past, both because most people realise that social norms inform all of us in how we think of our actions, and also because it's clear the person is no longer doing bad things or benefitting from our appreciation of their work. Practically, too, if we stoped looking at, listening to, artists who did some really bad things, we might find we are having to dispense with huge amounts of work.
It's interesting that we seem to consider this mainly in connection to the arts. If we found out that the man who invented the pneumatic tire was a rapist, I don't think many people would feel some sort of moral obligation to stop using those tires. Yet it's a kind of creative endeavour, engineering, as is science at times, architecture. What's the difference?
Specifically in the case of RP, I think there are a lot of confounding factors. He is still alive, but it's not just a person with a body of work who committed crimes we find really morally repugnant. I suspect if he had gone to prison, it would seem simpler - it's the fact that he has really escaped justice that adds to the difficulty and also that he seems to have gained no perspective over time.
I don't think it's abnormal as such to be sexually attracted to someone once they have entered puberty, but that's why it's really important to have firm boundaries around that and for adults to be especially responsible. Unfortunately that period in the 60s and 70s had some really poor messages going on in some parts of society as a result of the sexual revolution, and in that sense I don't think it's surprising that teen girls were admitted to many adult situations. Quite a few people who were alive then (my mother being one of them) have since realised those were not good situations and that a lot of exploitation went on. Time has revealed this pretty clearly really.
RP though had a particular fetish for very young women, and still seems to see no problem with that way of thinking about human sexuality, that anyone who is old enough to have an interest in sex, feel desire, can enter the sexual marketplace, and sex itself is a purely hedonistic act, an act of the moment. It's a kind of amoral view of reality.
What this makes me think is that it comes back to that question, how can someone be so insightful in their art, and yet do something that seems like calculated evil. Lots of people who did bad thing sin the sexual revolution were essentially taken up in the way things were going, in their own immaturity. RP actually embraced the whole thing intellectually, even spiritually, you can see that Nietzschean view reflected in his films as well. It's bleak and inhuman, but there is a logic and also a kind of honesty that can be startling.
Anyway, I think Chinatown is maybe the greatest film I've ever seen, but I don't watch it any more, because I am too uncomfortable with RP being at large, and that I would be funding him. Maybe if he was in prison or having to live as a hermit because of social rejection, I's feel differently. That's what should happen. I would not want to see those films taken out of the canon though, or never shown again, or anything like that.