'My Mind Recoiled but my Body Betrayed me': Roman Polanski's Rape Victim Describes Sex Attack in Graphic Detail for the First Time
- Samantha Geimer's tell-all book, The Girl, offers disturbing insight into assault
- Describes feeling 'complete and utter emptiness' as he raped her
- Details of how he plied her with champagne and sleeping pills before raping and sodomizing her in Jack Nicholson's jacuzzi
- Now-married 50-year-old victim is still in touch with Polanski, 80
By Daily Mail, 28 September 2013
The woman who was drugged and raped by Roman Polanski at the age of 13 has described in graphic detail for the first time what happened on that fateful day 37 years ago in
Jack Nicholson's LA home.
In Samantha Geimer's book The Girl, the 50-year-old writes of the days leading up to the attack, when the Chinatown director told her mother he wanted to take pictures of the teen for French Vogue but would not allow her to accompany her daughter.
Describing the sexual assault, Geimer reveals that Polanski first plied her with champagne, taking pictures of her in the jacuzzi in just her panties before giving her a sleeping pill.
'He puts his camera down and says he’s getting in,' she writes. 'He’s getting in. I’m fine with taking off my top...But this? No.
'I want out. Now,' she recalls. 'How f*****g stupid could I be? It’s a hard thought to hold on to. The water is hot, and the steam is rising into the night. I knew this wasn’t right.
In Samantha Geimer's book The Girl, the 50-year-old writes of the days leading up to the attack, when the Chinatown director told her mother he wanted to take pictures of the teen for French Vogue
Victim: Polanski asked Samantha to join him at Jack Nicholson's house for a French Vogue photo shoot
Twist in the tale: Polanski and Samantha Geimer as they are today. The pair have been in contact over email
'He pulls me a little closer by the waist and helps hold me up a little and moves me above one of the jets so I can feel the bubble tickling up between my legs. There’s nothing good about it, but I know what he’s getting at.
'Then everything hits at once. The steam, the heat, the alcohol, the pill and the panic. Have you ever been touched in a way that made you want to jump right out of your skin?
Out now: The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski book cover
'This man had a reputation as a great lover. The problem is, he was not my great lover. I could have been any girl, as long as I was female and as long as I was young.
'He holds my arms at my sides and kisses me,' she claims. 'And I say, "No, come on", but between the pill and the champagne it’s like my own voice is very far away.'
Describing the moment he began to perform oral sex on her she says: 'He asks if it feels good, which it does, and that in itself, is awful. I don’t want this, my mind recoils, but my body is betraying me.
'And that’s when I check out. I go far, far away. There is a sense of complete and utter emptiness.'
She recalls getting dressed and going out to the car to go home while Polanski stopped to chat with Anjelica Houston who was dating Jack Nicholson at the time.
'I was happy to know I was going to be home soon,' she writes. 'But I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and although I didn’t realize it, pretty loaded.
'I started to cry, with both relief and anger. I knew something bad had happened, and that I had done some dumb things, but I was going to be okay.'
Speaking at an event last week to promote her book, Geimer surprisingly asked for 'justice' for her rapist and urged that the judge who presided over the case be investigated to show that he acted improperly in seeking a longer prison term for Polanski, now 80, after the film-maker had served just 42 days in a state jail.
‘This is America — you’re supposed to get justice.’
Polanski, a man with whom she says she now exchanges friendly emails, was ‘mistreated’.
She feels the feted movie director, revered by the A-list friends who closed ranks around him after his crime 37 years ago, must be allowed to return to the U.S. with all charges dropped.
It is the latest extraordinary twist in a tale which, perhaps better than any other, lays bare the dark, cynical heart of Hollywood.
A 13-year-old Samantha in 1976 from a photo that she had in her modelling portfolio before she was raped
An aspiring model, she was flattered that a Hollywood heavyweight wanted to take her photograph
Samantha faded into a life of obscurity after the attack — having her first child at 19, marrying and moving to Hawaii, where she had two more children and worked as a PA.
But now, aged 50, she has emerged from Polanski’s shadow with her book, in which she finally gives her version of what happened and describes the extraordinary scenes at her home after the attack.
Samantha says she first met Polanski, then 43, early in 1977, a month before the rape. A mutual friend had approached her mother, Susan, about Polanski photographing her daughter for French Vogue. (The magazine later denied making any such commission.)
Samantha describes herself as ‘unexceptional-looking’. And, crucially, unlike the actress Nastassja Kinski — with whom Polanski had recently begun an affair when she was 15 — she looked very much her age.
She admits that she, her mother and her step-father Bob, who published Marijuana Monthly, a magazine for cannabis smokers, were flattered by Polanski’s attention, though she rejects claims that her mother, an ambitious aspiring actress, had effectively pimped her daughter out in order to court favour with the director.
They simply didn’t know he had a reputation for liking young girls, she insists. Rather, they knew him as the ill-starred husband of actress Sharon Tate, who had been murdered by drug-crazed followers of Charles Manson in 1969.
But Samantha admits she was both attracted and repelled by the diminutive Polish-French director.
‘Mostly I was thinking: “Ew, there’s this guy who’s, like, my size and sort of looks like a ferret. But he’s super-powerful and he wants to photograph me. Me!” ’
After his first visit, Polanski returned to the family’s Los Angeles home within days with a camera, whisking Samantha off for a ‘test-shoot’. Desperate to please, she instantly obliged when he asked her to take her top off — she did not yet wear a bra.
A few days later, Polanski was back to do the real shoot, wearing a pinstripe shirt, ankle boots and reeking of cologne. Looking for a suitable set, he and Samantha first visited British star Jacqueline Bisset, who offered her a glass of wine (Samantha scoffs at Bisset’s subsequent claim that she mistook her for an adult.)
The Chinatown director, here with lead actors Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, says the sex was concensual
Friends: Polanski and Nicholson grew close. It was in Nicholson's jacuzzi that the director raped the 13-year-old
An aerial shot of the Mulholland Drive home of actor Jack Nicholson where film director Polanski raped Geimer
The house: This image of Jack Nicholson, his then-girlfriend Anjelica Huston, and his daughter, shows the inside of his home where Samantha came for her photoshoot. She was given champagne and a sleeping pill
They then drove to actor Jack Nicholson’s home on Mulholland Drive as Polanski fired off questions about her sex life. She’d had sex once with her 17-year-old boyfriend but, wanting to impress, told him ‘twice’.
Feigning an asthma attack, she told Polanski she needed to go home. Instead, he guided her by her shoulders into a bedroom
Nicholson was away but a housekeeper let them in. Polanski then photographed Samantha sipping champagne, pouring her four or five glasses in all.
He told her to take her top off again, and then, having persuaded her to share a Quaalude (an immensely powerful sedative pill used as a recreational drug), he persuaded her to strip and get in the outdoor Jacuzzi.
When he did the same and joined her, she knew the photo-shoot was very definitely over.
Feigning an asthma attack, she told Polanski she needed to go home. Instead, he guided her by her shoulders into a bedroom.
She was so intoxicated by the alcohol and the Quaalude, Polanski didn’t even need to use force, she recalls.
She knows she told him to stop at least twice but, as she acknowledges, Hollywood names such as Polanski — he had then directed Chinatown and would later direct Tess and The Pianist — ‘get used to no one saying no’.
Samantha lays all the blame for the 36-year legal farrago on Judge Rittenband. She wants an investigation
In her book she says: 'Mostly I was thinking: "Ew, there's this guy who's, like, my size and sort of looks like a ferret. But he's super-powerful and he wants to photograph me. Me!"'
He raped her and then, after discovering she was not on the Pill, defiled her even more severely.
Tears streamed down Samantha’s face as Polanski drove her home. He has always denied their encounter was anything but consensual, claiming in his autobiography they had been ‘making love’.
Arrogant even by Hollywood standards, Polanski was later brazenly to tell the writer Martin Amis in an interview that ‘everyone wants to f*** young girls’.
And in his autobiography, he gleefully admitted seducing teenage girls at a nearby finishing school as he recuperated in the Alps from his second wife’s murder.
But on this particular evening, he asked Samantha to keep quiet. ‘This will just be our secret,’ he said.
Back at the Geimer home that same evening, when Samantha’s parents saw the topless photographs they threw Polanski out and, eventually, called the police.
‘Had it been a child star who was the victim of someone outside the Hollywood establishment, they would be screaming for his scalp’
Samantha claims that the subsequent legal and media storm — which involved her giving the most private information about herself to a grand jury — was an even more harrowing ordeal than the rape.
Anxious to spare her a trial, her lawyer arranged a deal allowing Polanski to admit the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.
He spent 42 days in state prison for a psychiatric examination, but his lawyers say they then learned that Laurence Rittenband, the case judge, intended to renege on their agreement not to give Polanski any more jail time.
Terrified he could be imprisoned for decades, the director took a one-way flight to London and then on to Paris. He has not returned to America since.
Today, Samantha lays all the blame for the 36-year legal farrago on the judge. ‘As an American, I’m offended our justice system was corrupted,’ she says, with no hint of irony.
She wants ‘justice’ for Polanski — and she doesn’t mean a jail cell, but an investigation into the actions of Judge Rittenband, who is no longer alive to defend himself.
People were shocked when she made that demand at a book-signing event last week at Manhattan’s Hilton Hotel.
After the bubbly blonde’s breezy, half-hour talk, one man was so puzzled that he asked her if she actually thought Polanski did anything wrong.
Yes, she said — though quickly adding that ‘1977 was a very different time’.
Desperate to shake off her image as a helpless victim, Samantha has turned into an unabashed champion of Polanski, saying she ‘wishes him nothing but a nice life’.
Her staggering claim that Polanski is as much a ‘victim’ as she is has drawn an angry response from prosecutors, who have spent decades attempting to bring him to justice.
Steve Cooley, the LA District Attorney who tried to extradite Polanski from Switzerland in 2009, said that Samantha had become an ‘aider and abetter’ in her efforts to portray a ‘child molester’ as a victim.
‘You may want to ask her the details of the settlement she reached with Polanski,’ he said, referring to a 1993 out-of-court, six-figure settlement after she sued him in civil court.
‘And while you’re at it, ask how she enjoyed walking down the red carpet at some of these events feting Polanski for his genius and accomplishments — which she has done.’
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