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

Far from the carelessness she’d been accused of, this nudging me toward Polanski was actually an example of her standing her ground as a parent. You could accuse my mother of cluelessness. But you couldn’t accuse her of not wanting the best for me.

Her remark was not stricken from the record.

Then Mom recounted how I had spoken to her from Nicholson’s house, and how she asked if I wanted her to pick me up, and I said no—and then how Polanski got on the phone and told her about taking pictures in the Jacuzzi. (“I thought, ‘Why a Jacuzzi?’ But I didn’t say anything. I just didn’t.”) When I came home, Mom reported, I told her about the asthma. She had no idea why I said this, but tried to cover for me. “[Polanski] asked me about her asthma…. And I said, ‘Yeah, it’s really too bad.’ And then he said, ‘What kind of medicine does she take for that?’ and I said, ‘Oh, lots of different kinds,’ just fumbling around.” When Polanski showed her the photos of me topless from the first photo shoot, Mom tried to take the logical approach. “I decided not to say anything so that Samantha would not feel like she did an awful thing and cause a big scene. I thought I would wait and get him out of the house, because we didn’t sign a release for the pictures, and he couldn’t print them. And I thought that to be the end of that.”

Mom tried to talk dispassionately, but she couldn’t hide how weird it all was: me rushing past her, Polanski coming in, showing my family the topless photos from the first photo session, she and Kim being freaked out, the dog peeing on the floor. “It must have been some kind of energy thing happening because she never does that.” (It was the 1970s; we talked a lot about strange energies. And dogs really do pick up on things.)

Kim was next. She testified about how she saw the photos, how the dog peed—and how Polanski gave her a big lecture about how she wasn’t disciplining her dog correctly. (Dog owners like to be corrected about their discipline techniques about as much as mothers do.) She then talked about how she eavesdropped outside my room while I was talking to Steve.

Then came the criminologist who testified about my panties. To people who are into forensics, this was interesting. He testified that semen was found in the underwear, but not sperm. How? Unclear. Low sperm count, or possibly vasectomy. (But then again, why did Polanski ask me when I’d last had my period if he couldn’t get me pregnant? Of course, the test wasn’t conclusive. We hadn’t seen the last of those panties.) There were also swabs from other parts of my body—vagina, anus—again with the appearance of semen, but no sperm. It was an unfortunate finding for the prosecution; the testing method for semen was known not to be as accurate as the testing method for sperm. First, there was a chance that the chemical used to detect semen was instead detecting enzymes in vaginal fluid; it was all a question of how quickly the chemical applied to the stain changed color. (In this case, it changed color very quickly, indicating semen.) And second, sperm would have helped identify the perpetrator more readily, although not with the almost 100 percent accuracy of today. But at any rate, one could argue (and clearly the defense intended to) that the semen came from someone else.

After the lunch break, it was my turn.

I remember watching a Twilight Zone episode like this, where the accused was set off in the shadows, his face alone cast in harsh light. I felt like I was being tried for a crime. Maybe I was. Three rows of middle-aged strangers stared at me stonily as I answered questions. They studied my face, my body, my gestures. I didn’t look at anyone. I had this plastic heart-shaped pendant my friend Terri had given me; it was striped, with little rainbow layers of color. I held it tight, and as the questions kept coming at me I twisted it round and round my fingers. No one sat next to me on the stand. Not my mother, not an attorney. In one week I’d turn fourteen. I was put under oath, I was forced to answer every question and told that if I didn’t, or if I told anyone what was said in the courtroom, I would be in major, major legal trouble.

This may sound cavalier, but it is true: If I had to choose between reliving the rape or the grand jury testimony, I would choose the rape.

Assistant District Attorney Roger Gunson was a handsome man, in a square-jawed, straight-arrow, Eliot Ness kind of way. He gently placed laminated proof sheets from both shoots in front of me. I didn’t really want to look. He started by asking me about that first shoot—how, exactly, did I end up with topless photographs? “Was that at his request or did you volunteer to do that?”

“That was at his request,” I replied. It was hideously embarrassing to explain I wasn’t wearing a bra because—well, look at me. Did I need a bra?

We moved on to the day in question, step by step by step. Taking pictures at Jacqueline Bisset’s house, moving on to Jack Nicholson’s, and the various exhibits—what I was wearing.

Exhibit Four: “Does this appear to be the panties you were wearing?”

I looked at them.

“Yes,” I said.

It was beyond mortifying. A room of middle-aged strangers thinking about me in those panties. And why did every guy have to call them “panties”? Couldn’t they have just said “underwear”?

“After he kissed you, did he say anything?” asked Gunson.

“No.”

“Did you say anything?”

“I said, ‘No, come on, let’s go home.’… He said, ‘I’ll take you home soon.’ ”

“Then what happened?”

“And then he went down and started performing cuddliness.” (My mother didn’t want me to use slang when we talked about this. She told me the term was cunnilingus . Apparently I didn’t quite hear her correctly.)

“What does that mean?”

“It means he went down on me, or he placed his mouth on my vagina… he was just like licking and I don’t know. I was ready to cry. I was ready to cry. I was kind of—I was going, ‘No, Come on. Stop it.’ But I was afraid.”

It went on like that. I had to talk about having oral sex, having anal sex, being drunk, being dizzy with the Quaalude. They asked me to describe him having an orgasm inside my butt, and the semen leaking out, and the woman knocking on the door, me trying to leave… and him guiding me back to the couch. And then, all of it again.

The doctor at the hospital testified that I had not sustained any tears or injuries during intercourse—and that he had not found any semen rectally. Not necessarily because ejaculation hadn’t happened, but because—as I’d testified—I’d had a bowel movement after seeing Polanski, thus possibly eliminating the semen. This, of course, is also something every teenager wants to discuss in front of a roomful of adults: pooping.

They asked how often I had had intercourse before. I said twice—which again wasn’t true. I had fooled around with my boyfriend; there was kissing, groping. But sexual intercourse had only happened once, with someone I knew well. So why did I hold to this stupid lie? What would the grand jury have thought if they realized I was saying I had more sexual experience than I actually did, not less? It’s just the kind of thing a dumb kid does, and in this matter, I was a dumb kid—and scared.

The grand jury deliberated for all of twenty-three minutes before returning with the indictment on all six counts. Decades later, in 2009, some of the jurors spoke to the press about that day. One of them was Jean Biegenzahn, who was forty-eight at the time of the grand jury. (I think she was the one person who I actually looked in the eye during my time on the stand. I vividly remember looking up, seeing one woman looking at me sympathetically; then I never looked at the jury again.) Biegenzahn thought I looked like her daughter. “She was so scared, and here are 23 old fogies watching her,” she said. Biegenzahn believed me, as did the youngest juror, Joanne Smallwood, then thirty-nine—though she also thought I was “fast” for my age.