The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

by Samantha Geimer

  When we got boyfriends, there was endless scheming over how and when we would see them. When we didn’t have boyfriends, we were on the prowl. Everywhere we went—Hershey Park, out for dinner with my dad, the local ice show—we were scanning the place for boys. (A word of advice to today’s teenagers: Ice Capades is generally not the best place to meet boys . . . unless you are a boy.) Innocent moments could turn sexual in a heartbeat. One moment we were swimming with a neighborhood boy named Tom. The next moment he’d pulled out his penis and was proudly showing it to me. I don’t remember why. I probably asked to see it. At that point, you didn’t really need much pretext for events like that.

  John continued to play the part of my main squeeze. My only goals in life at that point were to listen to Aerosmith, stay a little bit numb at all times, and make out with John. We had a poolroom in our house and a stereo system, an ideal gathering place for our gang. (However, for some reason, it was where my father stored his collection of antique glassware—how excited would he be about a bunch of teenagers playing eight-ball around his Lalique?)

  My jazz-loving father (his sound track was Miles and Coltrane) noticed that his daughter was going off the rails, so he began instituting rules about how and when I saw John. No kissing on the front porch—and absolutely no being alone in a room together. For this reason, I think we managed to have sex once, maybe twice the whole summer. I was furious.

  I think my heightened interest in sex was a reaction to the rape. My reasoning went like this: If I had had to put up with a creepy old man taking what he wanted from me, why couldn’t I give freely what I had to give to someone I loved? My body, I thought. Mine. Of course, I was about as likely to have a mature relationship with someone as I was to win an Oscar. Sex at that age wasn’t about connecting with another human being; it wasn’t even about orgasms (at least not for the girls—all the manuals were telling us it was our right to have them, but try telling that to a fourteen-year-old boy). And if you had sex once or twice, it wasn’t something you necessarily continued to have. It was more like this toll you paid to cross the bridge to adulthood.

  Nevertheless, I was determined to control my own life, and having sex was an important part of this control. There were the usual buckets of teenage rebellion, of course. But there was something else. I realize that many women who’ve been raped take a long time before they want to be touched again. My attitude was different. I think I wanted to replace a dark, chaotic experience with something pleasurable and normal—and within my control. John was the “man”—or boy—for the job: we were as in love as you could be at fourteen or fifteen, and he made me feel adored and desired and good enough. And oh, how I needed that.

  Sure, there were times when I thought of what happened, times when it snuck into my consciousness. But I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to be damaged.

  And here’s the thing: Back then, I didn’t think I was. Not by the rape, anyway. It seemed the entire world was telling me I was either his little slut or his pathetic victim. I was neither. Why did everyone want me to be one or the other?

  Of course, within that wistful hope for normalcy there was a great deal of denial and dopey behavior. Before I ever became sexually active my mother had taken me aside and given me some sort of spermicidal cream, which I used the one time I had sex with Steve in California. So I was cautious and sensible enough there, even at thirteen. But then there was Polanski, and then York, and I didn’t bring protection with me. (And if you think in 1977 the average fourteen-year-old boy was thinking of using a condom . . . please.) So it was perhaps a blessing my father at least put obstacles in my path. Things could have been a lot worse.

  But that summer all I remember is the sense of relief that I was not in the thick of it. I had this vague sense of a storm gathering back in California without me. I wrote in my diary: “If the publicity gets too bad maybe I could stay here. Maybe they won’t be able to find me.”

  · · ·

  I wasn’t wrong about the “gathering storm.” While I was being a brat in York, all the parties were getting ready for Polanski’s trial in Southern California. Despite the overwhelming evidence, it was impossible at that point to know which way a trial would go. On the one hand, the defense had done a really good job rallying support from the Hollywood community, spreading lies, and using the press to discredit me. On the other, Polanski had many of his own impending troubles. Shortly into the proceedings in mid-April, Polanski, with the judge’s consent, had retreated to his home in London to escape the press (I wonder if a noncelebrity would be given this professional courtesy). Unbeknownst to us at the time—and something that would have undoubtedly come out at trial—the magazine that Polanski was allegedly doing the photo shoot for, Vogue Hommes (not Vogue Paris as we had always believed), was essentially saying to him: Photo shoot? What photo shoot?

  In Polanski’s version, recorded in his autobiography:

  When I tried to call [Vogue Hommes editor Gerald] Azaria—the same Azaria who had begged me for an interview and urged me to undertake the layout that had led to my troubles—he refused to come to the phone. I went to see [Vogue publisher] Robert Caille and explained how essential it was for Azaria to testify that I’d been working on a bona fide assignment. After hemming and hawing, Caille finally said, “He can’t do that. You had no formal, written agreement.” I certainly didn’t, but then, I hadn’t even had one for the Vogue Christmas issue until it was almost on the newsstands. I said everyone in Vogue knew I’d been offered the assignment.

  “Look,” said Caille, “we’ve already been questioned by a man from Interpol. He came to ask about your assignment. We said we knew nothing about it.”

  I felt betrayed.

  By the time Polanski published this, Caille had died, so we may never know what really happened. It’s entirely possibly he did have an assignment, and the editor at Vogues Hommes was too afraid to stand by it, for fear of being connected to the scandal. But it’s safe to say that the inability to produce any real assignment wouldn’t look good to an American jury.

  Meanwhile, there were the many hearings. Whenever there was a court date where Polanski was expected to show up, news organizations placed a full camera crew with reporters at each door. There were five entrances; that meant that every television station had to employ five full camera crews for the three-second Polanski sighting. I heard that the halls of the courthouse, usually a ghost town, were packed body to body. To get in and out under the radar, my usually impeccably dressed attorney, Larry, would wear running clothes, sweatpants, and a pullover sweatshirt. If you’re not in a suit you’re not an attorney, so in the sweats he wouldn’t be stopped by the press and legal groupies.

  Although a date was never definitively set, it seemed a trial was inevitable. There was a kind of ticking-clock feel to it all. And at that point Judge Rittenband did something truly odd—and something only the presiding judge in a courthouse could do. He ordered that the courtroom next to him be emptied, the tables and chairs ripped out. Then he ordered rows of tables and phone lines installed in order to accommodate local, national, and international reporting of the trial. Thoughtful to the needs of the press, to be sure—but perhaps a little too thoughtful? Not to mention expensive to taxpayers. This was the age before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, before TruTV, before the notion of court as theater. (Though it was the beginning of it all . . . there was a group of retirees known as the Santa Monica Court Watchers: smart people with time on their hands whose hobby was following court cases. Judges and attorneys used to welcome them in the courtroom, and go out to dinner with them to explain the cases.)

  With all the talk of Polanski’s lawyers forcing me to undergo psychiatric examination to see if I was fantasizing the rape, lawyer Larry decided to make a preemptive strike: he’d find his own psychiatrist to examine me. He didn’t do this to puncture my credibility, as the defense wanted to do, but rather to provide me with support, and comment on the effect of going to trial. Naturally I d
idn’t see it this way. To me this was another invasive adult demanding that I explain myself. You want to see obstinacy? Drag a fourteen-year-old girl to a shrink against her will. It felt like I was being punished for getting raped.

  I did end up answering questions, though. The person was nice, asked regular questions, and even I couldn’t stay bitchy enough not to answer. Before I knew it, it was over. The psychiatrist found that I was a healthy teenager but said there was no way to predict the wilting effects from the trauma of being cross-examined in open court. This was before the age of cameras in the courtroom, but given the laser focus that would fall on me, I would, in effect, be testifying in front of an international audience reaching millions. Larry knew that any person, let alone a fourteen-year-old, would be stretched to the limit by an ordeal like that. The rape, at least, had occurred in private. This would be public.

  · · ·

  While I was the costar of the Rape Scandal that went on in the press, I was only a bit player in everything that went on during the pretrial posturing. One of the more grotesque scenes was the dramatic “Splitting of the Panties.” (Actually, my sister’s panties, borrowed without asking.) I didn’t know any of the details until years later. This is what Larry told me:

  “When you were examined by the police, they took your rust-colored underwear as evidence. During the grand jury, the state’s forensic expert testified that the underwear had been tested, and that seminal fluid, but not sperm, was evident—a curious finding, but not unheard-of. Now, both sides wanted to test the underwear for the presence of sperm before the trial—and both sides were laying claim to the panties. Judge Rittenband’s Solomonic solution was to cut the panties in half, so both sides could take samples to their individual labs.

  “The question was: How and where to cut? The stain on the panties was not regular in shape, more like a gerrymandered congressional district. The problem was compounded by the fact that the density of the stain was also not easily divisible; it seemed to be two stains, and two compounds, overlapping each other.

  “So imagine—seven men, including a representative from the medical examiner’s office, Douglas Dalton, Roger Gunson, and me, staring down at your underwear—in a basement room of the courthouse.

  “We argued for over an hour whether to cut the stain this way or that way, with various suggestions proffered. I wanted four sides snipped, with each side getting samples from both parts of the stain, but I was shot down. Dalton and the medical examiner’s man argued strenuously, drawing lines in the air with a pointer. Finally, a technician wearing latex gloves gingerly began cutting, zigging a bit this way, zagging a bit the other way, as he if were cutting out letters for a science fair poster board.

  “Finally the deed was done, the panties snipped, with the prosecutor’s sample going to the Los Angeles County medical examiner and the defense’s sample, courtesy of Dalton, going to a medical lab of their choosing in Arizona.”

  Why were these panties so important? Well, at this point everything was important, and evidence gleaned by the panties might determine whether there would be a trial, which everybody seemed to want. The judge wanted to sit on top of the inevitable international media frenzy. The DA’s office wanted to prosecute the criminal and put him away. The defense felt emboldened because of the public success of their campaign to destroy my credibility and was confident it could be extended to the courtroom. The press wanted the trial for the same reason that sharks like swimming around popular beaches. The only ones who didn’t want a trial were me and my family. My parents believed it was more important to protect me than to see Polanski get a long sentence.

  The only way out was a “plea bargain.” Polanski would plead guilty to some lesser charge, get a judicial slap on the wrist, and we could all leave the whole sordid mess behind. If the facts gleaned from examining my underwear strengthened the DA’s case, Polanski might be more willing to accept a plea bargain. On the other hand, if the underwear evidence was inconclusive, Polanski and company might prefer to take their chances with a jury. Why?

  Well, first of all, perhaps Dalton, Polanski’s lawyer, really thought his client was innocent. That’s possible. But even if he didn’t, he felt at that point he could win a complete acquittal. This was, after all, a he said/she said situation (the “he” being a beloved famous man, the “she” a not-100-percent-inexperienced kid). The medical examiner had found only semen and no sperm—meaning that a jury would hear the possibility that I, who admitted to having sexual experience, might have had that underwear stained with someone else’s semen. More to the point, being found guilty of any of the five more serious charges could mean that Polanski would be deported. Polanski most definitely did not want to be deported. He loved America and Hollywood, and America and Hollywood loved him right back, blessing him with the holy trinity of success in the movies—money, power, fame. In addition, his departure would mean many people would lose their meal ticket. Polanski was making a great deal of money not only for film studios, but also for a coterie of agents and publicists. He was a one-man industry. Who’d want to see that industry flee to Europe?

  That’s why all the fuss over scraps of stained fabric.

  · · ·

  In 1977, the modern victims’ rights movement was still in its infancy. The first state and federal victims’ rights legislation was five years away, and it was to be thirty years before California would act on it. Criminal prosecutions traditionally involved just three parties: the state government, represented by the judge who would judiciously apply the law; the people of the state, represented by the prosecution advocating for a guilty verdict and punishment for the accused; and the defense, advocating for finding the accused innocent. All parties seemed to be doing their jobs. Of course, I was oblivious to all this at the time. It only occurred to me years later that there was a greater significance to what we were doing in my case. We wanted to get recognition for a fourth party—the victim. Mine was a weak voice among the powerful parties, asking, “What about me?”

  The prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Roger Gunson, was a sensitive and straightforward man. But he had one mission—to convict Roman Polanski. The defense, led by attorney Douglas Dalton, similarly had only one goal: to get their client off. Their strategy seemed to be to establish reasonable doubt. The trial would pit Gunson, trying to prove that Roman Polanski was guilty of the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, against Dalton, trying to establish reasonable doubt of Polanski’s guilt by showing weakness in the prosecution’s case. Pulling the strings was Judge Rittenband, basking in the spotlight. And at the center . . . me.

  I was an uneasy participant for all concerned: a crime victim, and an uncooperative witness for the prosecution. My parents’ judgment—and I couldn’t agree more—was that given my attitude toward the case, I would be more damaged by the proceeding of a trial. None of us wanted me to grow up being the focus of an international sex scandal, and all I wanted was a “normal” life, or at least a chance at one. It was Larry’s job to get me that chance.

  We all understood that avoiding a trial meant Polanski would get off with a minor punishment for this major crime but we were clear where our priorities were. Traditional ideas of justice or biblical retribution were moot. My family and I simply wanted him to admit what he’d done, and then vanish from our lives. I figured by this time, he was already pretty damn sorry he’d done it.

  Whatever it cost for me to go back to being a normal young teenager . . . that was enough justice for me.

  Larry first proposed the plea bargain idea to Roger Gunson. The assistant DA was sensitive to our concerns and open to the idea, but clearly preferred to try the case. I’m not sure what his reasons were—he might have been eager to try such a high-profile case, he may have been feeling pressure from his superiors, or he may have simply believed it was the right thing to do. Perhaps it was a combination of all three. At that time, he was unwilling to commit to the particular details of a plea bargain. Larry then approached Dougl
as Dalton about it. He listened to Larry and responded in his usual quiet, formal way that he would consider it. But Larry was getting the message that Dalton was not interested. Perhaps Dalton thought he could create a stronger bargaining position by being noncommittal. Or perhaps he thought he could sew doubt in the court’s mind by destroying my credibility.

  The challenge was compounded because the district attorney had just announced, after some public criticism of past plea bargains, that there were to be new standards under which they could be considered. The new plea bargain prescription was intended to give the appearance that District Attorney John Van de Kamp was being tough on crime. Now a defendant had to plead guilty to the charge that would result in the maximum amount of jail time.

  Thus the timing for a high-profile plea bargain couldn’t have been worse.

  Two weeks and two days after my panties had been cut (the estimated time Dalton said it would take to get the forensic results from his expert), Dalton called Larry to discuss the plea bargain. Attorneys can be on opposing sides of a case and still like and respect each other. That was not true of Dalton and Larry. They were like two gladiators circling in a fight to the death. I never doubted that Larry had anything but my best interests in mind, but I know he also liked the idea of crushing Dalton. It was Dalton, not Roman, who was asking about my sexual history and questioning my mental health.

  There is still a certain amount of mystery attached to the results of these tests. After two weeks, Dalton must have had them, but he never said anything to Larry. The test results of the prosecution’s sample were positive for semen but negative for sperm. The semen could have possibly belonged to someone else. Sperm may have provided a clearer link to Polanski. Still, after presumably getting the results of his sample back, Dalton wanted to discuss a plea bargain. Is it possible that somehow sperm had been found in that portion of the sample? Perhaps the defense’s test results made this less of a he said/she said situation after all.