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

I was seated in a wooden chair across the desk from the district attorney, an older man with dark hair who seemed distinctly unhappy, yet relished his authority over everyone in the room. Everyone else in the room seemed to stay as far away from him as possible.

He looked at me intensely and said he wanted truthful answers. While I had immediately sensed Detective Vannatter believed me, I immediately sensed this man did not. I tensed, partly because of the woman sitting directly behind me. It had been explained to me that because I was female there needed to be a woman in the room, but it made me uneasy that I could not see her but sensed her presence. If she was there to provide me with a sense of comfort, well, it wasn’t working out.

At least with Detective Vannatter, it was one-on-one. Our talk seemed private. But here I was surrounded. The other men, whose names I did not know, looked at me deadpan. Even their occasional polite smiles were flat. Again I faced questions about whether I had ever had sex before meeting Mr. Polanski, and other questions about body parts and what Mr. Polanski had done to me and what I had done in response.

Why did you take off your clothes and get into the Jacuzzi?

Where did Mr. Polanski touch you?

Again, did he put it inside you?

Have you ever had sex before? And then: Have you ever had sex with Bob?

With Bob ?

Now I was furious. I sat rigid with my arms folded, and spit out the answers. I don’t think I made a good impression, but then I didn’t see why I had to. I was the one who had been raped. Why was everyone asking me about what I’d done with my boyfriend, what I’d done with my mother’s boyfriend?

I was relieved when it was over, but before I could leave, they had to take my fingerprints. They were investigating the crime scene, and they needed to be able to distinguish all the fingerprints at the home. I was angry—what did I do to be treated this way?—but I was also a kid who’d seen her share of cop shows, so there was something kind of cool about being treated like a criminal. Having seen this kind of thing on TV made it more real.

Throughout the night and morning, I had been asked about Mr. Polanski: What did he say? What did he do? And what sort of relationship did we have?

My mother kept muttering about the son of a bitch who did this to her daughter. But I cannot tell you that over the hours I thought of him even once. I mean, really thought about him. I was not angry at him. I did not feel sorry for him. Nothing. He had quickly become unreal, a man who existed only on paper or film.

Later, though, I wondered: Where was he? What was he thinking? Was he feeling angry with me? Sorry? Was he feeling anything at all?

A day or two later I opened the paper.

There we were.

March 12

LOS ANGELES (AP): Film producer Roman Polanski has been arrested and booked on a charge of raping a 13 year old girl. Polanski was arrested Friday night, a day after the rape allegedly occurred at the West Los Angeles home of actor Jack Nicholson. He was released on $2,500 bail.

Police also arrested 26-year-old Anjelica Huston, the daughter of movie director John Huston, on a charge of possessing cocaine. She was booked and released on $1,500 bail.

Police and district attorney investigators took the 43-year-old Polanski into custody at 8 p.m. Friday at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, a police spokesman said.

The complaint against Polanski was reportedly filed by the girl’s mother.

Miss Huston was arrested by officers Friday when they went to Nicholson’s home on Mulholland Drive to search for evidence in the rape case.

Police spokesman Lt. Dan Cooke said Polanski and the young girl reportedly were alone in the house at the time of the alleged rape. It was not known immediately where Nicholson was.

Police officials refused to release other details in the case.

Polanski’s wife was Sharon Tate. She and four others were murdered in Polanski’s Hollywood home by Charles Manson and his followers in 1969 while Polanski was in London.

Roman Polanski was arrested Friday night, March 11, about twenty-four hours after we left Jack Nicholson’s. No one called to tell us it had happened. Mom and Bob read it in the newspaper. It was unsettling, thinking that some of what I had told the police officers and Detective Vannatter and the deputy district attorney was now showing up in print for the world to see. That first wire service article said that Polanski had lured a thirteen-year-old girl to Jack Nicholson’s house on the pretext of photographing her, then drugged and raped her. He also was suspected of sodomy, child molestation, and furnishing dangerous drugs to a minor.

I’m thinking, This seems like a big pile of Awful for something that took only a few minutes.

Subsequent articles said that my mother and Polanski met to plan the photo shoots, and that my mother was angered after seeing the topless pictures. The implications were obvious: gold digger parents, hot kid as payoff. Several years later, in 1984, Polanski would write an autobiography, Roman. He would say that at the time of the first meeting at our house, my mother had asked him to recommend a good agent to her, and that Bob had asked him to pass along an interview request to Jack Nicholson on behalf of his magazine, Marijuana Monthly, because Nicholson had been known to support the legalization of soft drugs like pot.

My mother did ask for an agent recommendation. Bob did ask for Polanski to pass along the interview request. Did that imply there was some sort of quid pro quo for professional courtesies that included nookie with the thirteen-year-old? (Neither the agent nor the Nicholson interview came through.)

We also soon learned that during one of the searches of Nicholson’s house, Anjelica Huston, Nicholson’s longtime girlfriend, had been arrested on charges of cocaine possession. The dark-haired woman at the house who’d knocked on the door during the rape—that was Huston; she wasn’t supposed to be in the house that evening, because she and Nicholson had recently broken up. But now I’d gotten her in trouble, too. It might occur to you that making enemies of Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Houston was not a recipe for Hollywood success.

(Incidentally, some of the articles also suggested I had been the one to bring cocaine and Quaaludes to the house. A few pegged me as a drug dealer.)

Later still, we heard more details. After raping me at Nicholson’s and dropping me at home, Polanski returned to business as usual. He had a meeting that evening with Robert De Niro to discuss the making of a movie based on a William Goldman novel, Magic . (The movie was eventually directed by Richard Attenborough and starred not De Niro but Anthony Hopkins.)

The next day Detective Vannatter and an assistant DA named Jim Grodin went to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Polanski was staying. He was with friends in the lobby, preparing to go out as the two investigators were coming in. They asked to speak with him, and as he separated himself from his group, he asked if whatever they wanted would take more than a few minutes. He was impatient to get on with his night on the town.

He seemed to have absolutely no clue he had done anything wrong—though he did try to inconspicuously drop the Quaalude he happened to be holding; the arresting officer caught him and seized the pill. That fact alone is odd, since Polanski had a prescription for Quaaludes for sleep problems. One can only speculate that maybe at that moment, it seemed too obvious he wasn’t using the pills for sleep.