The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

by Samantha Geimer

  But I was in pain. I still remember an afternoon soon after the rape, when I was feeling . . . I guess I would say “bottled up.” I took out a razor blade, and started making teeny, tiny cuts on the inside of my wrist. Not enough to do any real damage, just enough to hurt. Those pinpoints of blood made me feel better. They also gave me an excuse to get attention from Steve, whom I still wanted. I made him swear not to tell his mother, which of course he did, which prompted a call to my mother, and it was completely embarrassing because I had no intention of killing myself. But looking back, using that physical pain to dull my emotional pain was exactly what I was doing. I understand “cutting”—and I can comprehend why girls do it.

  * * *

  1. The U.S. media generally doesn’t publish the names of rape victims because of the traditional (and, I hope, outdated) concern that the victims suffer humiliation and harm to their “reputations.” Also, one of the reasons that a large number of rapes go unreported is that the victims don’t want public exposure. These concerns aren’t so strong in Europe.

  CHAPTER 10

  As spring gave way to summer, Larry got a call from Roger Gunson advising him that certain news organizations had petitioned Judge Rittenband to release the grand jury testimony, and that the district attorney would not oppose that request. He didn’t expect that Defense Attorney Dalton would oppose it, either, and heard that Rittenband had already decided to grant the motion to release the transcripts of the grand jury testimony.

  The grand jury testimony they were particularly interested in was mine, my mother’s, and my sister Kim’s. It discussed the events of that evening in graphic detail, events that thus far had not reached the public eye or the eyes of any of my friends, classmates, or teachers. It seemed that all the parties had an interest in trying this case in the court of public opinion. All the parties but me.

  The judge and the district attorney’s office were touched by politics, and there was a benefit to them in being cooperative and cozy with the media. They, and particularly Judge Rittenband, were not immune to enjoying being the center of attention, and the release of the transcripts would only heighten anticipation and awareness of the upcoming trial. The defense would get the damaging allegations out earlier and could start trying the case in the media, campaigning to destroy my credibility by innuendo and lies without being challenged by the rules of legal practice. The most damaging portion of the grand jury testimony was that it would identify me by name and provide public access to my home address. The release of that information would be a disaster for my family’s privacy, and it wouldn’t exactly work wonders for my mental state either. Nobody likes the sense that people are whispering about them behind their back, the sense—or the certainty—in my case that I’d arrive somewhere and everyone would say, “That’s the one. You know what happened to her?” Teenagers are self-conscious for no reason whatsoever. Imagine having one really, really big reason. I had never felt so hideously singled out—and so alone.

  It was clear we had to do everything we could to oppose the release of the grand jury testimony. DA Roger Gunson told Larry it would be an uphill battle because of Rittenband’s coziness with the press.

  It seems shocking now, but in 1977 there was no precedent in California—or in any of the fifty states—for protecting the privacy of a victim who had testified before a grand jury. Larry did research, research, and more research and could find no such case. Nothing. This was a huge problem. It seemed so obvious to us that the transcripts shouldn’t be released, but astonishingly the law wasn’t on our side. It’s not like Larry could go before the court and argue, “Your Honor, trust me—I know I’m right.” Unable to find a legal precedent, Larry looked for an analogy—a much weaker authority, but at least something to take to the court. His question/argument became: “If the state of California doesn’t do anything to protect the identity of victims, what efforts do they ever make to protect the identity of anyone?” This was not just “out-of-the-box” thinking; it was miles away from the box.

  What my clever attorney found turned yet another concept on its ear. California protects juvenile crime perpetrators’ identities from public disclosure. The theory (a good one, I believe) is that if we label a juvenile as a criminal publicly, the chances of his reformation or rehabilitation are substantially reduced, so by protecting that privacy, both the youthful offender and society may benefit.

  It was a little far-fetched, so Larry thought the argument might be more moving if he presented it orally rather than putting it before the court in writing. We knew that Judge Rittenband had already made his decision before Larry had even entered the courtroom. We had this one chance—a long shot—to change his mind. Larry was confident in our position but uncertain about the outcome. Judge Rittenband was sensitive to public opinion, so Larry’s message was going to be “If you rule against my thirteen-year-old client, people may think less of you.”

  As Judge Rittenband started to announce his decision, Larry interrupted and said, “May it please the court, I represent the victim in this case and I would like to address the court on the issue of the release of the grand jury testimony.” He then made a detailed argument that there were statutes that protected criminal perpetrators from public disclosure, including testimony or reports about their criminal behavior. He provided citations. He argued that had the victim in this case been the accused criminal, the policy of the state of California would be to protect her privacy and not to permit disclosure of her name and identity.

  “Is it the policy of the state of California,” Larry argued, “that we would provide greater protection of privacy to a juvenile criminal as compared to a juvenile victim? Does it make any sense for this court to release the name of a juvenile victim when this court would be precluded by the policy of the state of California and its statutes from releasing the name of a juvenile charged with the same crime?”

  Judge Rittenband sat motionless for what seemed like an hour to Larry, but was probably only a couple of minutes. Then he spoke. “It is the policy of this state to protect the identity of criminal perpetrators if they are juveniles. It would make no sense to release the identity of a child who was a victim. Consequently, the motion for the release of the grand jury testimony is denied, and it will not be released pending further order of the court.”

  It would be nice to think the judge was persuaded by the morality of Larry’s points, but I believe he was measuring the public reaction and possible criticism for “outing” me. It didn’t really matter. I was happy, and my identity would continue to be protected. For the moment.

  · · ·

  In that awful spring leading up to ninth grade graduation, I was intent on getting a boyfriend—and I got one. Sort of. Ron was one of the wilder boys in school; he was a partier who rode dirt bikes and hunted rattlesnakes in the hills. I was a little afraid of him, which made him all the more alluring. And even though Ron and I didn’t last very long—there were a few weeks of endless kissing and getting caught by Nana before I got scared and called it quits—we are friends to this day. (He is, in fact,one of my children’s godfathers.)

  The pressure from the press continued to heat up. Despite the best efforts of everyone around me, most grown-ups in my neighborhood eventually learned that I was The Girl in the Polanski case. (The newspapers had identified a girl in Woodland Hills, and before March 10 I’d told a few people I was modeling for Roman Polanski. It wasn’t hard to fit the pieces of the puzzle together.) Kids weren’t really paying attention—but then a camera crew showed up at school. You know that recurring dream we all have where we forget to put on our clothes, and go out in public naked? This felt like walking around school naked.

  Adults were often more judgmental than kids. I remember the day things went south between me and my friend Terri. It was toward the end of ninth grade and, as was often the case, she and I were hanging around my house. My uncle Bruce, an amateur photographer, was showing some of the footage he’d taken of the Holi with Guru Ma
haraj Ji. At some point, Terri’s very conservative Catholic father showed up in our driveway—just in time to see a houseful of hippies heading out to their cars. He smelled incense and thought it was pot. He and my mother argued loudly. He said something about me being a slut and that Terri couldn’t come to my house anymore. He took Terri by the arm and put her in the car. I was furious with my mom for fighting with him, and she was furious that he—a neighbor—was acting this way.

  There is a certain kind of religious mind-set that believes girls who get raped deserve it. If you were morally sound, God would protect you from rape. And therefore, you must be as guilty to have been a rape victim as the rapist was to rape you. No one quite articulates it that way, but that’s the way many people really think.

  Terri went to another school for tenth grade. We tried to stay in touch, but that was pretty much the end of our friendship. I was devastated. I knew she wouldn’t argue with her father. I tried to pretend I wasn’t hurt, yet I felt utterly betrayed. It was one thing for me to be branded as a slut by an anonymous tabloid, but quite another when it came from the father of a close friend, someone who knew me. Someone who should have known better.

  But if there were some very hard times during the months leading up to my graduation from ninth grade, I have to say this: I was saved by the decency and loyalty of the kids closest to me. I remember one evening in particular with a couple of friends, including a boy named Scott. Scott was a year younger than I was, kind and handsome and very indulgent. We’d practice the dances of the day together—the hustle was our particular fave—because his mother had a dance studio. And he would watch Bugsy Malone—my movie obsession at the time, a British musical gangster film acted entirely by kids—over and over with me, and let me act out all the parts. (When we reconnected as adults, I wasn’t surprised he was gay, but at the time I just thought he was the best friend ever.) In any case, one day a few weeks after my rape, he and another friend were over at my house discussing the details of the case, which was all over the news; they were riffing in the way only preteen boys can. This was right before my identity in the neighborhood became common knowledge. The media had been going on about Mom—what a relentless stage mother she must have been, to pimp out her daughter to a known wild man—and the boys were talking about how disgusting this mother must be. Of course, they had no idea they were talking about my mother. “I’d love to meet the mother of that girl and tell her what an ass she is,” Scott said.

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “You have met her,” I said. And then I told them the story.

  Maybe it was because they were stand-up guys, or maybe it was because they simply couldn’t wrap their minds around it, but Scott never told a soul until 2009, when Polanski was arrested at the Zurich airport and I told him it was fine to talk. That kind of discretion is unusual in anybody, never mind a thirteen-year-old boy.

  The media’s interest continued to intrude in all aspects of my life, but I think it was the school incidents that made me feel the most vulnerable. Like the day a creepy photographer/reporter caught me outside my last-period drama class and began firing questions at me before I realized who he was and what he was doing. He was stalking me for photos he could sell to tabloids (later the photographs appeared in a German magazine). I’d put the incident behind me until someone told me that the local paper—the Valley News—was going to publish one of the photos the next day identifying me as The Girl in the Polanski case.

  I was panicked. It was the one time in those early days that I called Larry. He was out of the office, but I told them it was an emergency, that they had to track him down and get right back to me. This was before cell phones, but they paged him. He got the message while driving down Olympic Boulevard. He pulled over and called me from a pay phone on the street outside a carwash. It was a sweltering hot day and the sun beat down on him in his heavy suit and tie.

  Newspapers at that time did not publish the name of rape victims, let alone underage rape victims. The threatened publication cast doubt on whether I was a credible rape victim, or an ambitious young girl victimizing this famous director to cash in.

  With the sun beating down on his head, and cars whizzing by on the street, Larry immediately called the newspaper. There was no point talking to an editor with a scoop; that was like shooing a vulture away from a carcass. So he asked for their lawyer. He told him what the issue was, and said that in the event that this photograph was published, it would constitute an invasion of my privacy. The lawyer argued (that’s what lawyers do) that I was in the public eye. I wasn’t. Not then. And wouldn’t be unless they put me there. The public didn’t know who I was. They argued about the basis for Larry’s demand, which also included the (arguably) moral obligation of a newspaper to not cause harm with their reporting. It’s funny to think of Larry having this heavy philosophical argument from a pay phone outside a car wash.

  Their lawyer told him that stringers—people not in the employ of the paper—had secured what they believed, but were not absolutely certain, was my photograph, taken while at school, suggesting that since they were not employees of the paper, the paper was not liable. Larry countered: “Won’t you be embarrassed or even economically liable if your paper publishes the wrong photograph or identifies the wrong person?” He added that this trespass on the school property to secure an unconsented-to photograph of a student was likely to be a crime, and that the publication by the Valley News would then be aiding and abetting a crime after the fact by paying people to have committed a criminal act. Larry did not back down. He knew what was at stake for me.

  The paper’s attorney was noncommittal. My mother and I were frantic waiting for the paper to come out the next day.

  They did not publish the picture.

  CHAPTER 11

  In the summer of 1977, America became a little bit unhinged. Fuel prices were so high and shortages so common that citizens band radio, or CB, culture took over, started by cross-country truckers intent on circumventing police surveillance. Smokey and the Bandit was a huge hit. It was also the summer of Star Wars and The Deep (and thus the time when Jacqueline Bisset, who’d offered me wine at her house, truly became an American superstar). Jimmy Carter was the new president.

  Elvis Presley died; Apple computers were born. And in what might be regarded as the birth of the gay rights movement in California, two hundred thousand protesters marched through the streets of San Francisco to protest Anita Bryant’s anti-gay remarks and the murder of Robert Hillsborough, the gardener attacked and killed by four men screaming “Faggot.”

  While I was an unwilling part of the news of the day, I was oblivious to the larger currents of social change. After graduating from high school, I moved back to York to be with my father for the summer. I met his new girlfriend (and eventual wife), Jan, who was a lovely, down-to-earth, fifties throwback of a woman, very Betty Crocker, as different from my mother as it’s possible to be. She was wonderful to me, and I was a bitch. I hope that everyone who was like me at fourteen will stop what they’re doing for a minute, put down this book, and send flowers and an apology to the good stepparent who put up with them.

  For me, the summer was an escape from all that was going on with Polanski back in California. I look at my diary from the time, and it reads something like this: blah blah blah boy blah blah blah pot blah blah cute boy blah blah liquor cabinet. These entries, of course, were preceded by this thoughtful observation several months earlier: I got my pics taken by Roman Polanski and he raped me, fuck.

  I was intent on restoring normalcy, and to me that meant hanging out with my friends, listening to music, getting high, and making out with boys. My partner in crime was my BFF (as they’d say today), Michele, whom I’d been tight with since elementary school. Michele was having a very hard time herself that summer. A male relative, an awful, scary guy, was getting drunk at nights and being abusive toward her. She was afraid to tell her mother. Several months earlier, she had seriously considered hurting
herself. As it happened, it was the night I was with Polanski. For years we convinced ourselves that these two awful things happened on the same night because we had some sort of psychic bond: I was hurt, so she had to hurt herself. Nothing beats a teenage girl’s capacity for self-dramatization.

  But at the same time, our dramas were real, and our desire to escape them was also real. We hung around in a little gang that summer: me, Michele, and a group of boys who could ping-pong back and forth between being our pals and our love interests in a matter of hours. Our parents were at work, and none of us went to camp. (My one-week experiment with camp ended when I begged, and was permitted, to come home. I hated the girly-girls, hated making lanyards, and the only thing I remember enjoying there was liberating the poor box turtle a bunch of kids had caught and stuck in a cage—my final defiance against the system.) Mostly we hung out in the parks, playing ball and getting high; the kid who scored some beer or weed was always the most popular. Getting in trouble was our hobby. Nothing major (I saved that for the next summer), but we worked on creating just enough mayhem to piss people off. I don’t think any of us acted out because we were “damaged” by our traumas; we were just young teenagers on the prowl. When we went anywhere we always walked four or five abreast in the street, never on the sidewalk. Not that we were looking to annoy people, though there was that; mostly it was because we didn’t want to have any of us have to walk behind the other and be left out of the conversation. We were pack animals.