Samantha Geimer - The Girl - A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

Bob was pacing. “How dare he? Oh my God, that fucker had her take her top off. Should we call someone? Maybe we should call someone.” In our house, it was my mother who was in charge. It was her decision.

At first, she tried to soothe herself with the legality of the whole thing. “We didn’t sign a release. He can’t do anything with those pictures,” she said. But it wasn’t enough. “He did that with my daughter? He thought that was okay?”

At that point they knew nothing other than that he had taken topless pictures of me—but that, in itself, was enough of a reason for a freak-out. It wasn’t just the toplessness alone, though there was that. It was the deception. The betrayal of trust. In their minds Vogue meant two things: fashion and clothes. Lots and lots of clothes. The sheer badness of the photos made them realize something was wrong.

Mom and Bob threw out ideas. Call a lawyer. Call Jack. Call Henri and let him know what his friend did. Or, then again: Say nothing. Just keep him away from Sam. They were trying hard to be calm about this, with me in the next room. My mother spoke in a panicked whisper. She went to her bedroom to lie down and think it through. Bob lay next to her and fell asleep. Mom lay there thinking.

Kim came in to check on me. She was at my door, about to come in. She paused. By this time, Steve had come over, let himself into the house, and was in my room. She overheard my conversation with him: He went down on me…

She turned around, walked to the back of the house, and tapped on Mom’s door. Mom was staring at the ceiling, a hand on her forehead.

“He fucked her, Mom,” Kim said. Bob woke with a start.

Then, Mom was in my room.

“Did he make you have sex with him?”

I was confused, still frightened, high from the Quaaludes but not understanding it, grateful just to be home, and now my mother had found out. She was quivering with rage. It’s just sex, I told myself.

“Did that happen? Tell me the truth.”

“Yeah,” I said.

That night my mother sat beside me quietly. Occasionally she hugged me and cried a little. I don’t remember what she said. Probably nothing. She was lost in thought.

The story that would be repeated in the press for years was that my mother had, for lack of a better term, pimped me out—that she had set me up with Roman as a kind of bait, not only for my career but for hers.

In fact, as improbable as it now sounds, it never, ever crossed her mind that he would have sex with me. First, even though there were movies like Taxi Driver and Manhattan, which featured a twelve-year-old prostitute and a forty-year-old man’s relationship with a high school student, no one talked about real-life child sex abuse. The McMartin nursery school case, for example, where nursery school owners were (falsely and hysterically) accused of ritual sexual assaults on children, was still many years in the future. And however “adult” I may have acted… I looked like a child.

Then there was Roman’s fame. It protected him, but not just in the way people would assume. We wanted something from him—that would be people’s first thought. We did want something from him, too. But the idea that my mother looked the other way because of his fame—that’s what was false. See, because of his fame, she never for a second thought she would have to look the other way. He’d had Sharon Tate. He’d had Nastassja Kinski. Why, if you could have the most scintillating women in the world, would you have a thirteen-year-old girl whose dream date was Steven Tyler and whose best friend was a bird?

But then, the real answer to “Why me?” is quite simple—like Sir Edmund Hillary’s answer to “Why climb Mount Everest?”

Because I was there.

Over the years many have said my mother could not have been that naïve; surely she had her own experiences with the casting couch. Well, in fact, she didn’t. She was auditioning mostly for commercials, which was a more straightforward business—you had to please a lot of “suits,” not artists. She did once have the head of a really big studio call her in because “your head shot has been sitting on my desk and I was intrigued and wanted to meet you.” He wanted to know if she had someone to take care of her, and she said, No, she was really fine taking care of herself—and that was that.

But that night, she wasn’t sitting and thinking about this rationally. She was thinking what an idiot she’d been. And what she was going to do next. I heard her saying over and over, “The fucker. The fucker. I’ll kill him.”

After much discussion and back-and-forth, they decided to call Ed. Ed Ehrlich was my mother’s accountant. Exactly why she thought her accountant would be the best man to call in a situation like this is a little murky, but it seems that he was, to her, the levelheaded “fixer,” the one who could be relied upon to make a cool-headed decision divorced from untoward emotion. And maybe he knew a good lawyer.

“Call the police,” he said.

Within an hour, two cops in full uniform were standing in Kim’s room—Kim’s, not mine, because mine was in its usual volcanic state. Mom, Kim, and I sat on the edge of the bed. They probably would have sat down if there had been a place to sit, but there wasn’t, so they loomed over us. Police often look kind of bored. These did not. The name Roman Polanski had their attention.

“Tell them everything,” my mother said.

I never would have been so honest if I hadn’t been so high. How I’ve wished, over the years, I’d never told anyone about that poke in the butt.

I felt like I was on an audition. Only I didn’t look at them as they scribbled away. I didn’t really speak to them, either.

Why was Mr. Polanski taking pictures of you?

Did he force you to do this?

At any time did he strike you?

Did he offer you alcohol or drugs?

Did he touch you? What did he do? What did you do?

Do you understand what intercourse is?

“Yes,” I told the officers.

Did Mr. Polanski insert his penis into your vagina?

“Yes.”

Then—did he do anything else?

This took a bit of time. I whispered the answer to Kim. She caught her breath. I think she may have been holding back from crying. She looked at Mom.

“Yes,” Kim said to the officers. “He also put it in her butt.”

Hearing this, my mother fell back on my bed with her arms out over her head, whispering, “Oh my God.” Her reaction really startled me. Was this a terrible thing? Like, worse than the other?

I began the day in homeroom class, and now I was lying on a plastic-covered piece of foam rubber in a curtained-off cubicle in the emergency room at Parkwood Hospital, ten minutes from home. I had been in hospitals before—I’d had chronic bladder infections as a kid—but this time there was a sense of crisis. Police waiting for me in the hallway, two nurses holding clipboards scurrying around silently. And everybody was looking at me—curiously, sympathetically, suspiciously, maybe all three. Nobody talked to me, which was probably just as well since I was sitting there seething.

Being here was my mother’s fault. My fucking mother! I wasn’t bleeding or bruised. If Mom hadn’t called the police, I could be home in my bed now, sleeping it off, instead of here in a drafty green hospital gown after midnight. And they wouldn’t let her in the room when they examined me. I wanted her there, so she could see how mad I was.

“Where’s my mother? Can she come in?”

“Your mother is right outside, waiting,” the nurses said.

“Where’s my mother and where’s Bob?”