Under the effects of alcohol and drugs, and overwhelmed by the star power of the successful director and his greater age, Geimer said she did not try to fight him off.

"Why fight?" she wrote. "I'll do pretty much anything to get this over with." She described her fear and her tears later in the car as Polanski drove her home and asked her if she was OK and told her not to tell her mother.

"I got my pics taken by Roman Polanski and he raped me," she wrote after that night in her diary, according to the book.

She pressed charges, becoming the focus of a media and police storm, which prompted her, she wrote, to wish she had never told anyone what happened.

"Somehow, what had happened - as bad as it was - was not going to be as bad as what was coming," Geimer wrote.

"I ran into the two-headed monster of the California criminal justice system and its corrupt players, whose lust for publicity overwhelmed their concern with justice."

At age 13, "My crime? Being the rape victim of a Hollywood celebrity".

Now a mother of three, Geimer said she harbours no hate or rage for her attacker. "My family never asked that Polanski be punished. We just wanted the legal machine to stop," she wrote.

And Geimer repeated that she ultimately forgave Polanski, not for him, but for herself, and denounced those who describe her as a "victim", a label she rejects.

She also included a short letter Polanski sent her in 2009, in which the fugitive said he wanted her "to know how sorry I am for having so affected your life".

After pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor, Polanski served 42 days at a secure unit undergoing psychiatric evaluation. But the Franco-Polish director, now 80, fled the United States on the eve of his sentencing in 1978 amid fears the trial judge planned to go back on a previously agreed deal.

In 2009, he was arrested again in Switzerland as the US sought extradition. But he was ultimately freed by Swiss authorities.