The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

by Samantha Geimer

  The judge overseeing the case was a man named Laurence J. Rittenband. Rittenband never had any doubt about what he would do with his life. He went directly from high school to New York University law school, and then, when he was declared too young to sit for the bar exam, went to Harvard Law School for a few years and graduated summa cum laude. He worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York City, served in World War II, and eventually moved to California, where he was appointed a judge in Los Angeles Municipal Court, and then to the Superior Court by the governor of California in 1961.

  Rittenband was a bachelor and bon vivant, and had an attraction to some of the more provocative figures in jurisprudence. He was reportedly a good friend of Los Angeles lawyer Sidney Korshak, the Chicago mafia’s West Coast fixer. At the time of Polanski’s indictment, the seventy-one-year-old Rittenband had two long-term girlfriends, according to Polanski film documentarian Marina Zenovich. “I have one that cooks and one that does the other stuff,” he boasted. The one who did “the other stuff”—Marlene Roden—was barely twenty years old when she met the judge. Rittenband clearly liked much younger women, and Zenovich hints that he saw a little of himself in Polanski.

  The judge took great pride in his membership in the posh and almost exclusively Jewish Hillcrest Country Club. In 1979 the initiation fee was around $50,000 (today, $180,000); members at the time included Groucho Marx, Milton Berle, and Jack Benny. (Danny Thomas was the first non-Jew admitted, causing Benny to quip that if they were going to admit a Gentile, they should at least get someone who looks like a Gentile.) In a town where so much business was conducted on the golf course, membership in this club could make a career.

  Personal peccadilloes aside, Rittenband was considered a very smart and fair judge, one who came to trial prepared and would listen to all arguments. At the same time he did not suffer fools. He was not nasty, but he was gruff; he never sugarcoated anything.

  He did have one weakness, though, and it turned out to be a tragic one: he was addicted to high-publicity cases. Over the course of his long career he presided over Elvis Presley’s divorce, Marlon Brando’s child-custody battle, and a paternity suit against Cary Grant. As the judge with the most seniority in Santa Monica, Rittenband used his power and position to replace the judge originally assigned to the Polanski case. He appointed himself.

  Reports of his gossiping about the case with other Hillcrest members were rampant; one member of the club since the 1970s recently told a friend of mine that Rittenband was a “pompous ass” who couldn’t resist regaling cronies with details of the cases he presided over. According to a People magazine article at the time, the judge, who kept two leather-bound scrapbooks filled with newspaper accounts of his past trials, had scoffed at the notion that Polanski couldn’t get a fair trial in Los Angeles. “People here are more sophisticated than anywhere else in the country,” he said, “and from what I’ve been able to gather, public opinion is divided on who is at fault. There are those who think Polanski a devil, and others who wonder why a mother would let her 13 year old daughter go around with a 43 year old film director anyway.” The fact that the judge on an active case was sitting for an interview with People magazine pretty much said everything about who he was and what he valued.

  Anyway, the grand jury was here to see if it could indict Polanski on six counts: furnishing a controlled substance to a minor; committing a lewd or lascivious act; having unlawful sexual intercourse; perversion; sodomy; and rape by use of drugs. I wasn’t thinking about this, of course. I was just thinking about sitting under those flat lights, saying what happened, and getting the hell back to class.

  In the waiting room, everyone sat dreading their turn and worrying about whoever was in there—Mom, Bob, and Kim. Even Steve had been called to give his version of what I had told him. He might even be questioned about having sex with a minor himself. I had even put the guy I had been so crazy about in jeopardy. He must have been scared to death, only seventeen himself, thinking he would have to recount our one time together. He’d always told me I was too young for him—and now look where he was. His mother was with him and she sat quietly, knitting and occasionally crying. My mother felt sorry that her son had been dragged into all this and she tried to comfort her. But as it turned out, she wasn’t crying over her son’s involvement in this case. One of her friends was dying of cancer. That didn’t make any of us feel better.

  My mother was the first witness called. Assistant District Attorney Roger Gunson asked about how she and Polanski had connected through Henri Sera, Kim’s then boyfriend, and then about the initial shoot. It’s funny, looking back now on some of the things she said. When Polanski presented the idea of this photo shoot of young American girls, my mother said, “I thought he might want younger girls.”

  Younger! This moment showed how her mind was really working. Somehow she had gotten the impression that he was photographing children. And she didn’t think for a second that he was a pedophile. Apparently he had been dating Nastassja Kinski, who was fifteen at the time, but my mother had no idea. His taste for young girls, news to us, would soon be widely publicized. But Kinski, however young, looked like a woman and I did not—and my mother simply did not put me into that category of nubile beauty who would have caught his attention. So it was the idea that I was too old for the shoot, not quite a child anymore, that was worrying her. That Polanski had a sexual interest in her daughter never occurred to her. Truthfully, until that night it had never occurred to me, either.

  “Did you ask Polanski if you could go [on the shoot]?” Gunson asked. “Yes,” Mom said. “And he said no, that he would rather be alone with her because she will respond more naturally.” Mom recounted the story of Polanski’s return. “He drew some pictures of pirates for her.” I considered myself a decent artist, and I remember looking at Polanski’s pirate drawings and not being terribly impressed by his artistic skills. But my mother was thinking of me as a child he was trying to win over with cute little pictures; he might just as well have been sketching ponies and unicorns.

  Then they asked about the day, March 10, and my mother almost broke down. “Before she went, she had indicated to me that she didn’t like him. . . .” But Mom wasn’t answering a direct question, and Gunson asked that it be stricken from the record—because, I guess, it contributed to the idea that she was pimping me out to him in some way. Which, of course, she wasn’t. It was just that she had seen in the past how I would blow off things I’d committed to do in this teenage way. She hated that, and she wasn’t going to let me do it now. You want a career, kid? Well, suck it up and take care of your responsibilities.

  Far from the carelessness she’d been accused of, this nudging me toward Polanski was actually an example of her standing her ground as a parent. You could accuse my mother of cluelessness. But you couldn’t accuse her of not wanting the best for me.

  Her remark was not stricken from the record.

  Then Mom recounted how I had spoken to her from Nicholson’s house, and how she asked if I wanted her to pick me up, and I said no—and then how Polanski got on the phone and told her about taking pictures in the Jacuzzi. (“I thought, ‘Why a Jacuzzi?’ But I didn’t say anything. I just didn’t.”) When I came home, Mom reported, I told her about the asthma. She had no idea why I said this, but tried to cover for me. “[Polanski] asked me about her asthma. . . . And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s really too bad.’ And then he said, ‘What kind of medicine does she take for that?’ and I said, ‘Oh, lots of different kinds,’ just fumbling around.” When Polanski showed her the photos of me topless from the first photo shoot, Mom tried to take the logical approach. “I decided not to say anything so that Samantha would not feel like she did an awful thing and cause a big scene. I thought I would wait and get him out of the house, because we didn’t sign a release for the pictures, and he couldn’t print them. And I thought that to be the end of that.”

  Mom tried to talk dispassionately, but she couldn’t hide how weird it all was: me
rushing past her, Polanski coming in, showing my family the topless photos from the first photo session, she and Kim being freaked out, the dog peeing on the floor. “It must have been some kind of energy thing happening because she never does that.” (It was the 1970s; we talked a lot about strange energies. And dogs really do pick up on things.)

  Kim was next. She testified about how she saw the photos, how the dog peed—and how Polanski gave her a big lecture about how she wasn’t disciplining her dog correctly. (Dog owners like to be corrected about their discipline techniques about as much as mothers do.) She then talked about how she eavesdropped outside my room while I was talking to Steve.

  Then came the criminologist who testified about my panties. To people who are into forensics, this was interesting. He testified that semen was found in the underwear, but not sperm. How? Unclear. Low sperm count, or possibly vasectomy. (But then again, why did Polanski ask me when I’d last had my period if he couldn’t get me pregnant? Of course, the test wasn’t conclusive. We hadn’t seen the last of those panties.) There were also swabs from other parts of my body—vagina, anus—again with the appearance of semen, but no sperm. It was an unfortunate finding for the prosecution; the testing method for semen was known not to be as accurate as the testing method for sperm. First, there was a chance that the chemical used to detect semen was instead detecting enzymes in vaginal fluid; it was all a question of how quickly the chemical applied to the stain changed color. (In this case, it changed color very quickly, indicating semen.) And second, sperm would have helped identify the perpetrator more readily, although not with the almost 100 percent accuracy of today. But at any rate, one could argue (and clearly the defense intended to) that the semen came from someone else.

  After the lunch break, it was my turn.

  I remember watching a Twilight Zone episode like this, where the accused was set off in the shadows, his face alone cast in harsh light. I felt like I was being tried for a crime. Maybe I was. Three rows of middle-aged strangers stared at me stonily as I answered questions. They studied my face, my body, my gestures. I didn’t look at anyone. I had this plastic heart-shaped pendant my friend Terri had given me; it was striped, with little rainbow layers of color. I held it tight, and as the questions kept coming at me I twisted it round and round my fingers. No one sat next to me on the stand. Not my mother, not an attorney. In one week I’d turn fourteen. I was put under oath, I was forced to answer every question and told that if I didn’t, or if I told anyone what was said in the courtroom, I would be in major, major legal trouble.

  This may sound cavalier, but it is true: If I had to choose between reliving the rape or the grand jury testimony, I would choose the rape.

  Assistant District Attorney Roger Gunson was a handsome man, in a square-jawed, straight-arrow, Eliot Ness kind of way. He gently placed laminated proof sheets from both shoots in front of me. I didn’t really want to look. He started by asking me about that first shoot—how, exactly, did I end up with topless photographs? “Was that at his request or did you volunteer to do that?”

  “That was at his request,” I replied. It was hideously embarrassing to explain I wasn’t wearing a bra because—well, look at me. Did I need a bra?

  We moved on to the day in question, step by step by step. Taking pictures at Jacqueline Bisset’s house, moving on to Jack Nicholson’s, and the various exhibits—what I was wearing.

  Exhibit Four: “Does this appear to be the panties you were wearing?”

  I looked at them.

  “Yes,” I said.

  It was beyond mortifying. A room of middle-aged strangers thinking about me in those panties. And why did every guy have to call them “panties”? Couldn’t they have just said “underwear”?

  “After he kissed you, did he say anything?” asked Gunson.

  “No.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “I said, ‘No, come on, let’s go home.’ . . . He said, ‘I’ll take you home soon.’ ”

  “Then what happened?”

  “And then he went down and started performing cuddliness.” (My mother didn’t want me to use slang when we talked about this. She told me the term was cunnilingus. Apparently I didn’t quite hear her correctly.)

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he went down on me, or he placed his mouth on my vagina . . . he was just like licking and I don’t know. I was ready to cry. I was ready to cry. I was kind of—I was going, ‘No, Come on. Stop it.’ But I was afraid.”

  It went on like that. I had to talk about having oral sex, having anal sex, being drunk, being dizzy with the Quaalude. They asked me to describe him having an orgasm inside my butt, and the semen leaking out, and the woman knocking on the door, me trying to leave . . . and him guiding me back to the couch. And then, all of it again.

  The doctor at the hospital testified that I had not sustained any tears or injuries during intercourse—and that he had not found any semen rectally. Not necessarily because ejaculation hadn’t happened, but because—as I’d testified—I’d had a bowel movement after seeing Polanski, thus possibly eliminating the semen. This, of course, is also something every teenager wants to discuss in front of a roomful of adults: pooping.

  They asked how often I had had intercourse before. I said twice—which again wasn’t true. I had fooled around with my boyfriend; there was kissing, groping. But sexual intercourse had only happened once, with someone I knew well. So why did I hold to this stupid lie? What would the grand jury have thought if they realized I was saying I had more sexual experience than I actually did, not less? It’s just the kind of thing a dumb kid does, and in this matter, I was a dumb kid—and scared.

  The grand jury deliberated for all of twenty-three minutes before returning with the indictment on all six counts. Decades later, in 2009, some of the jurors spoke to the press about that day. One of them was Jean Biegenzahn, who was forty-eight at the time of the grand jury. (I think she was the one person who I actually looked in the eye during my time on the stand. I vividly remember looking up, seeing one woman looking at me sympathetically; then I never looked at the jury again.) Biegenzahn thought I looked like her daughter. “She was so scared, and here are 23 old fogies watching her,” she said. Biegenzahn believed me, as did the youngest juror, Joanne Smallwood, then thirty-nine—though she also thought I was “fast” for my age.

  There was so much fallout from that day. In his autobiography, Polanski would write that at one of the hearings Gunson’s staff saw me and Bob—my mother’s long-term boyfriend, a man I considered another father—“locked in a steamy, passionate embrace. It wasn’t the avuncular hug of a grown man comforting a young girl—it was more; her leg was between his legs.”

  I read this now and feel a little queasy. I did, in fact, sometimes regress with Bob; I remember sitting in his lap with my arms around him at one hearing. But the implication of this . . . Did anyone really report that? Did they really believe it?

  Polanski and his team acted as if they did. They also knew no sperm was found. Which must have emboldened them to do what they did next.

  POLANSKI PLEADED NOT GUILTY IN DRUG-RAPE CASE

  April 18, 1977

  (AP) Movie director Roman Polanski pleaded not guilty Friday to a Los Angeles County Grand Jury indictment charging him with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl March 10 in the home of actor Jack Nicholson. . . .

  “I am innocent and can’t wait to be vindicated,” Polanski told reporters after the brief court session. He was critical of coverage of his case, saying he thought that the news media had handled it “very poorly.”

  POLANSKI’S ATTORNEY TO SEEK SEX DATA ON GIRL

  Los Angeles Times

  April 21, 1977

  Film director Roman Polanski’s attorney said Wednesday he plans to ask for an inquiry into previous sexual activity by the 13-year-old girl Polanski is accused of drugging and raping.

  The lawyer, Douglas Dalton, indicated in Santa Monica Superior Court that he
will also seek a psychiatric examination of the famed film director’s alleged victim.

  “The facts that we’re aware of,” Dalton said, “show that before the events of this case, this girl engaged in sexual activities. We want to know when, where and with whom and why those people were not prosecuted.”

  . . . Polanski, 43, was asked by reporters how he expected the case to affect his life.

  The Polish director, whose wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by members of the Charles Manson family, replied, “I’m used to grief. This is a trifle.”

  And then, though the transcripts from my grand jury testimony had not yet been released, there was this:

  GIRL IN POLANSKI CASE ADMITS SEXUAL AFFAIRS

  Defense Files Motions Seeking Dismissal of Six Count Felony Indictment Against Director

  May 12, 1977

  . . . “I seek to ascertain if she is truthful about her previous episodes of sex,” Dalton said in his motion. “It is possible that she fantasizes or lies about previous sexual experiences . . .”

  Dalton said the prosecutor, by failing to question her further about when, where and with whom she earlier had sex, in effect deprived the defense of “vital” information that could be used to attack the girl’s credibility. . . .

  Dalton’s motions quoted a statement the boyfriend gave to the district attorney in which the boy said he talked to the girl just after the alleged rape. The girl “is always acting and therefore it was difficult to determine if she was truthful or not,” the statement said.

  The boyfriend also reported the girl’s recounting of the episode was “not in sequence” and she repeatedly said, “I don’t believe this is happening to me.”

  Well, I didn’t. But it did.

  But here’s the funny thing. I remember overhearing adults discussing how fortunate it was that I was not yet even fourteen when I was raped, that Roman was in even more trouble because I was thirteen . . . and I thought, Wait, how is that in any way good? And then, after the grand jury testimony where he was indicted on all counts, I overheard a discussion about how unfortunate it was that there was no physical damage to me—especially rectally. There was this sense of disappointment. If only he’d hurt me worse, in more obvious ways, everything would be better. It seemed very quickly that there was an attitude of winning-and-losing in court, not whether I’d actually been hurt. If the worse I were hurt the better, then why would anyone care that I’d been hurt at all? It is disconcerting to be a young girl and know that people are on your side yet still feel a sense of regret you weren’t damaged enough.