Speaking up for herself
Samantha Geimer, director Roman Polanski's rape victim 36 years ago, finally tells her side of the story
The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski
by Samantha Geimer
Atria
3.5 stars
It's a line Roman Polanski used in his 1974 film Chinatown, screenplay by Robert Towne: "You see, Mr Gittes, most men never have to face the fact that in the right time, the right place, they're capable of anything."
That line became the story of Samantha Geimer's life. Just shy of her 14th birthday, Geimer found herself posing naked in Jack Nicholson's jacuzzi, modelling for photographs Polanski claimed he was taking for a glossy magazine. The year was 1977, and the situation must have made Polanski indeed feel capable of anything.
This is not a simple story. It unfolded in a Hollywood era of situational ethics, when not many parents would object to a child's brush with fame
Under the influence of alcohol and quaaludes provided by the director, Geimer submitted to what her family, the Los Angeles Police Department and her lawyer called rape, though she took a more innocent view of the goings-on.
But was she ever really heard? Fame being fame, the sordid mess became Polanski's story, not hers.
As the title, The Girl, indicates, even when the violation of Geimer attracted enormous media attention, few Americans knew or mentioned her name. The European press identified her clearly enough for photographers to stake out her house and take pictures of her at school. But the news was all about Polanski's crime and, to some, his martyrdom at the hands of the US judicial system. "The girl" was collateral damage, nothing more.
Polanski is now 80, Geimer a 50-year-old wife and mother who lives in Hawaii and Nevada, and the incident is still not fully behind them. (Polanski is a French citizen who might face more prosecution if he returned to the US, which he fled in 1978.) Geimer is laying claim to her share of the encounter. With the help of her lawyer and a co-writer, she channels the bewilderment she felt while in Polanski's company, and the terror that came later. She has also become his vehement defender, on the theory that these bygones really are bygones, and that they occurred in a culture with very different values about sex and love.
Yet her story is told entirely on the surface, unlike that of kidnap victim Jaycee Dugard, whose memoir, A Stolen Life, has much more depth and shock value.