Hollywood has rallied behind Roman Polanski after his arrest in Switzerland over the weekend, with the actor Whoopi Goldberg suggesting that whatever he was guilty of it wasn't "rape-rape".

As a guest on The View chatshow on US television, she said: "I know it wasn't rape-rape. It was something else but I don't believe it was rape-rape. He went to jail and and when they let him out he was like, 'You know what, this guy's going to give me a hundred years in jail. I'm not staying.' So that's why he left."

Later in the programme she added: "We're a different kind of society, we see things differently ... would I want my 14-year-old having sex with somebody? Not necessarily, no."

Response from many female and some male bloggers was swift and furious.

On the Jezebel celebrity website , Lindsay wrote: "We learned about Whoopi's strange and fascinating moral universe, which includes the concept of "rape-rape."

On The Frisky Amelia McDonnell-Parry wrote: "Whoopi Goldberg, who I never expected to be a rape apologist, coins a term I've never heard before – 'rape-rape' ."