The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

by Samantha Geimer

  Almost immediately, from the start of this case, I felt the pressure to be damaged. But I refused to be damaged enough to be a “good” victim.

  CHAPTER 8

  It must have been torture for my father to be so far away from the action. I know how upset he was about what happened to me, but also he was an attorney, and I was in legal hell. He was especially outraged that the defense, trying to build a case that I had fantasized the rape, was asking the court to require me to undergo a psychiatric examination. He called his friend Robert P. Kane, the Pennsylvania attorney general, and asked him to recommend someone to handle opposing Polanski’s motion. Enter Lawrence Silver.

  Larry was a distinguished thirty-two-year-old deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania in 1977 when he quit, withdrew his life savings, put his few belongings in a yellow Porsche, and drove from the grim statehouse of urban Pennsylvania to the sunny beaches of Southern California. He later told me that his plan was to spend a year living by the beach and getting a tan for the first time in his life. It didn’t work out that way.

  Larry’s “year” of mellowing out ended in a matter of weeks when he was recruited by the business and entertainment law firm Loeb & Loeb. It was a big, prestigious job. They fast-tracked him to a partnership in the high-stakes world of Los Angeles business litigation. Welcome to Hollywood. Thirty-six years later, he’s still never gotten that tan.

  Kane called him and explained that a friend whose daughter had gotten into a little bit of trouble in California needed a lawyer. Larry said he’d be glad to take the call. My father phoned him moments later.

  Dad asked him if he knew about the Roman Polanski case—who didn’t?—and told him that the girl who had been raped by Polanski was his daughter, Samantha Gailey. The defense, he explained, claimed Samantha had fantasized the incident, and was demanding that she undergo a psychiatric examination.

  Dad was outraged at the California DA for not protecting me, and furious at Polanski’s lawyer for an unjustified and prejudicial intrusion. He said that seeking a psychiatric interview of the complainant was not only something he’d never do; he didn’t even think the law would allow it. Would he represent me and the family? To his credit, Larry gave him the caveat of his lack of experience in criminal law. But based on Kane’s recommendation, Daddy was willing to overlook it. Frankly, I think he thought it was probably a simple matter—one that a civil litigator could certainly handle. Larry told him he’d still have to get clearance from his firm for limited representation. There was some doubt they would allow it; much of their work was in the entertainment business, and he would be going up against a Hollywood luminary. But the prestige of a recommendation from a state attorney general trumped their reluctance. Well, that, and—as I’ve learned—in Hollywood even the lawyers are celebrity-obsessed. Larry was allowed to take the case.

  It was about two weeks after the grand jury testimony that I met Larry, when he came to interview me and my mother. (In my diary I wrote, “Have to meet my new attorney. Bummer.”) I’m sure he was gentle and careful with me. But I hated having to go through it all again—asking me about any of the events surrounding the rape, even if he didn’t press for details, wasn’t the best way to make a good first impression on this girl. I thought I was just sullen, but Larry told me later that the look I gave him when we met was hostile—like really hostile. He remembers me seated on one end of our brown sofa in the living room, my face contorting like I’d just bitten into a lemon, then turning away, pretending he wasn’t there. He would actually have to direct questions to my mother, who would then ask me. Ridiculous, I know, but I just didn’t want to deal with it. I wanted to go back in my room, shut the door, and be alone with my music.

  To this day Larry has never asked me the nitty-gritty of what happened in the room at Jack Nicholson’s house. I appreciate that, but it wasn’t just out of concern for me. As my attorney, it was more important for Larry to know the details of what happened before and after the rape: the meeting with Mom and Bob, what happened that made Terri, who was supposed to accompany me, not come along. Chronology mattered. Timing mattered. When articles of clothing were removed, when they were put back on (those damn panties again!), who said what, and when. Mostly this information was not essential for my representation; Larry said they were questions that the DA was asking, and he had to have the information. In my mind, I knew that Larry was on my side—after all, my father had hired him—and was just doing his job, but with all his questions, he seemed more like the enemy. I know it wasn’t comfortable for him, either, and given the chance, he’d rather have gotten information from Mom, Bob, or even from Kim, who hated talking about it almost as much as I did.

  I could see I was trying his patience, but he tried very hard to form a bond with someone who wished he would just vanish in a puff of smoke. He asked about my day-to-day teenage life, dreams, aspirations in that way that adults do to kids, and kids see right through. (He did get points by scoring VIP seats to the Led Zeppelin concert “The Song Remains the Same.” He might have been trying too hard, but I knew he was trying.)

  Over the years Larry became one of my most trusted allies and true friends, but back then he just seemed part of the hell I was being forced to go through. He was sympathetic, though, and it didn’t take long to convince him that my rape was no fantasy. Larry couldn’t understand why the defense was asking for the psychiatric evaluation; he said it would only inflame emotions on all sides.

  This is not to say the tactic of blaming the victim in a rape case was anything new. Quite the contrary: Even with forensic evidence of sexual activity, the defense tries to manipulate the issue to a he said/she said case, and often attacks the credibility and morality of the victim. Fortunately, two years earlier, California state senator Alan Robbins introduced and passed the Robbins Rape Evidence Law, which prohibited rape defendants from introducing as evidence at trial the sexual histories of their victims. The statute became a national model and was adopted in many states.1

  Larry thought Polanski’s lawyer, Douglas Dalton, was engaged in legal grandstanding. He was trying the case in the media, starting with the suggestion that of course I must be mentally unbalanced. From the legal point of view, Dalton’s strategy was ill-advised because it was a stretch to think the court would order a psychiatric evaluation of me, so he would be starting off with losing his first motion. I know that attorneys fight these battles with each other but still remain respectful of their adversaries. I could see that Larry was starting to dislike Dalton. I started to like Larry a little more.

  Larry prepared a draft opposing Dalton’s motion, and discussed it with him, hoping to find a compromise of some sort. The basis of his argument was that a witness to a crime was not subject to defense discovery that included a psychiatric examination. They went back and forth without coming to any agreement. Then, before the motion was scheduled to be argued in front of Judge Rittenband, Dalton withdrew it.

  We won! Dalton had withdrawn a motion that he had publicly announced he would bring. So . . . Hooray? Well, the truth is, I was so disengaged from what was going on that I wasn’t even aware of it. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to be dragged to a psychiatrist—a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. I paid no attention to the legal wrangling through this period, and only found out much later through written records, as well as Mom’s and Larry’s memories.

  But at any rate, that was it: Larry’s job was done. He dutifully reported the successful withdrawal of the application to my father, who was relieved, grateful, and impressed. Then he said to Larry: “I think this is going to be just the first round, and Samantha and Susan are going to need continuing representation. Would you be interested?” Larry was not by nature a lover of high-profile cases, but he wasn’t averse, either. And at this point, he was invested both as an attorney and a human being. Though perhaps he would have had a moment’s pause if he realized he was stepping into a modern version of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, the famous case in Dickens’s Bleak Ho
use that goes on for generations. This case he’d just agreed to handle would continue, in one form or another, for the next thirty-six years. (And counting.)

  * * *

  1. In 1981 Robbins stood trial, but was not convicted, for having sex with two sixteen-year-old girls he met in the state capitol in 1978 and 1979. In 1991 he was chucked from the California Senate and served a twenty-month jail sentence for taking bribes from lobbyists. Which proves that even a crooked pol can have a shining legacy.

  CHAPTER 9

  The months leading up to graduation from middle school were kind of a fog for me. My mother, normally a relentless photographer, stopped taking pictures altogether. I think she was afraid that somehow photos from that year could become evidence. Or maybe it was a reaction to seeing the snaps Polanski took of me. We became recluses. Normally Mom loved attention. Now she wanted all of us to be invisible.

  My name had been published in Europe,1 so now the phone rang incessantly. Mom and Bob changed our number, but soon reporters got the new one. There were some days when all it took was the phone ringing to make everyone jump.

  A particularly enterprising photographer in a brown station wagon camped outside our house on Peonia Road. I’d peek through the curtains to see the long-range camera lens in the driver’s-side window. The presence of that camera changed our movements. We became furtive figures dashing in and out of our own home.

  One day a radio DJ from Chicago called, and Bob, in an unthinking moment, actually said my name. Mom screamed at him.

  Kim never suffered the intrusions well. One day, when she picked up the phone and someone asked if we were prostitutes, she couldn’t stop herself from screaming, “You motherfucker!” Perhaps unsurprisingly, stories started seeping out about this unhinged family at the center of the Polanski scandal.

  Rona Barrett, the TV gossip columnist, was one of the few people in the media to provide a measure of decency. She called the house a few times and gently asked if she could sit down with Mom and me, promising that she would not come on strong. By this time my mother and Bob were cynical toward just about everyone’s motives, and would hang up on reporters. But this time, Bob picked up the phone, and something in Barrett’s voice practically broke him.

  “Please,” Bob said. “Don’t do this. We’re having such a rough time. Please help us protect her.”

  “It’s okay, I understand.”

  Dozens of reporters had said that, only to call again, or show up at our doorstep. But Barrett was true to her word and never called again.

  My family really, really needed to get away. With my mother looking for serenity, we took a mini-vacation in Miami with my mom’s sister Kathy and her boyfriend, Bruce, to attend a “Holi,” a Hindu festival of spring. At the airport I was scolded for having a notebook I’d covered with the brilliant observations of 1970s teenagedom: “Life’s a Bitch and Then You Die,” “Sneer at Death Fear Only Loss of Pride—Aerosmith.” Mom was always worried someone might get a photo of me that made me look bad, and I was angry and tired of being told how to act.

  What I remember of the Holi was running and dancing and being sprayed with colored rose water in a park. But that wasn’t the main point. Kathy and Bruce were followers of Guru Maharaj Ji (now known as Prem Pal Singh Rawat), who preached that an individual’s need for fulfillment can be satisfied by turning within to connect with a constant source of peace and joy. Here’s a taste of him:

  This universe is amazing, but the fascinating thing is not understanding this universe, but understanding that what powers the universe happens to be within us right now, and we can experience it. And when you do, you are filled with peace, with clarity, with joy.

  This is when you experience the truest, truest happiness.

  Call them cults, or call them personal growth movements: Today people tend to forget how many intelligent, well-educated people were experimenting with them at the time. My mother, for example, consumed therapies like potato chips—Gestalt, Fritz Perls, J. Krishnamurti; she loved the idea of change, of growth. (On the other hand, my father Jack once said to her, “I don’t want to grow. I’m grown. I like myself the way I am”—which was probably the beginning of the end of their marriage.) She also spent a weekend at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Popularized as an iconic weekend of free love in the 1969 film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and preaching “the continual exploration of human potential,” the Esalen movement counted among its followers Buckminster Fuller and Linus Pauling. It was good to be a seeker of truth, and if the truth was found by listening to some guy who was, say, an itinerant banjo player before deciding he was God, well, so be it. (That would be Mel Lyman, who founded the Fort Hill Community, a transcendentalist hippie commune based in Boston that more or less declared him a messiah and his music sacred. It attracted a number of wealthy and influential followers until the desire to rob banks began to take precedence over seeking world peace.)

  Whatever you may think of it, at a time of chaos in our personal lives, Guru Maharaj Ji gave my family comfort. And while at fourteen I was by no means attuned to his teachings, just being in this environment gave me a sense that you could transform the bad things in your life into a chance to learn—and transcend the badness.

  After the Holi we came back to Woodland Hills and I celebrated my birthday with family and a few friends—Steve, Terri, and a new boy who was vying for my attention and helping me get over Steve. But it was a subdued occasion, with my mom trotting out the giant carrot cake, complete with orange-frosting carrot on top, that made its appearance on all festive family occasions.

  For Easter break, I flew back to York, Pennsylvania—a glorious break, really. Everyone assumed that the night with Polanski was an event that would make me shy away from sex for years. That’s what people expected, and seemed to want. The contrarian in me rebelled. I met and befriended John, the boy (almost literally) next door, a cute, shaggy Shaun Cassidy–like strawberry blond who seemed to adore me as soon as we met. After the last awful month, which included not only Roman but also being dumped by the first boy I cared about, this is what I needed. An evening of making out on the porch on April 1 led to a gift—a cross on a chain—the next day, which led to drinking, getting stoned, and wonderful sex—a first—that night. There is something so earnest and yet sexy about getting a cross as a present.

  I was barely fourteen, and I suppose I should have felt guilty. I didn’t. I felt I deserved to wash away the bad experience with a good one, and John was the equivalent of a long, hot shower. My father was furious when he found my friend’s rolling papers at my house, but he softened on my last day there. We all came over to my house and watched George Carlin on television. I left the next day to face all the problems at home. But at least I was feeling hopeful about the summer.

  As difficult as it was to head home and face more of Roman’s denials, and more vilification of me and my family, it was nevertheless my best year in school. My drama club teacher, Mr. Mallot, was my favorite: he really liked me, and even though I was no one’s idea of a rising star—I tended to get the roles of stenographers and chorus girls—drama felt like a safe, comfortable place to be. (Which seems to be some sort of eternal verity for school outcasts, as anyone who lives for Glee can confirm.)

  Other teachers were also, shall we say, alternative. One of my teachers filled her thermos with so much booze we could smell it across the room, and at least one of the teachers dealt pot to supplement his dismal high school income. (In the late 1970s, pot was quite a different drug than it is today: much weaker, sort of like a hefty glass of wine that would give you a gentle rainbows-and-sunflowers high, as compared to today’s considerably more powerful hallucinogen.)

  In fact, even the teacher/student relationship was wildly different than it is today. Our relationships with teachers were warmer and fuzzier—and yes, as we got older, they sometimes crossed the line. But even when there were instances of creepiness, there was generally not a sense of criminality. In fact, not just
teacher/student, but any relationship where there was an obvious power imbalance—as with myself and Polanski—well, those kind of relationships were not as frowned upon then as they are today.

  I had reason to think about this recently while reading about the case of widespread sexual abuse in the 1970s and 1980s between teachers and students at Horace Mann, an elite New York City private school. One revered teacher, a professor of English as well as a chaplain and cross-country coach, who was accused of having sex with numerous boys, is now eighty-nine and lives in Santa Cruz, California. He explained his behavior to the New York Times. “The only thing I can assure you of was that everything I did was in warmth and affection and not a power play,” he said. “I may have crossed societal boundaries. If I did, I am sorry.”

  It’s interesting, his choice of words. If you’re the wrong age—too young, too old—you would read this and think, What a load of self-justifying horseshit. But if you hit that sweet spot—if you were anywhere from thirteen to forty-five in the 1970s—you could understand he really meant it, believed it, and even lived it without calculation or malice. There was something considered generally positive about erotic experience then, even in the absence of anything beyond the sex itself. The idea was that emotional growth came about through an expanded sexuality—for both the person in power and the relatively powerless. This is important to consider, because this is the cultural paradigm Roman Polanski was sopping up in 1977. As wrong as he was to do what he did, I know beyond a doubt that he didn’t look at me as one of his victims. Not everyone will understand this, but I never thought he wanted to hurt me; he wanted me to enjoy it. He was arrogant and horny. But I feel certain he was not looking to take pleasure in my pain.