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

Meanwhile, there were the many hearings. Whenever there was a court date where Polanski was expected to show up, news organizations placed a full camera crew with reporters at each door. There were five entrances; that meant that every television station had to employ five full camera crews for the three-second Polanski sighting. I heard that the halls of the courthouse, usually a ghost town, were packed body to body. To get in and out under the radar, my usually impeccably dressed attorney, Larry, would wear running clothes, sweatpants, and a pullover sweatshirt. If you’re not in a suit you’re not an attorney, so in the sweats he wouldn’t be stopped by the press and legal groupies.

Although a date was never definitively set, it seemed a trial was inevitable. There was a kind of ticking-clock feel to it all. And at that point Judge Rittenband did something truly odd—and something only the presiding judge in a courthouse could do. He ordered that the courtroom next to him be emptied, the tables and chairs ripped out. Then he ordered rows of tables and phone lines installed in order to accommodate local, national, and international reporting of the trial. Thoughtful to the needs of the press, to be sure—but perhaps a little too thoughtful? Not to mention expensive to taxpayers. This was the age before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, before TruTV, before the notion of court as theater. (Though it was the beginning of it all… there was a group of retirees known as the Santa Monica Court Watchers: smart people with time on their hands whose hobby was following court cases. Judges and attorneys used to welcome them in the courtroom, and go out to dinner with them to explain the cases.)

With all the talk of Polanski’s lawyers forcing me to undergo psychiatric examination to see if I was fantasizing the rape, lawyer Larry decided to make a preemptive strike: he’d find his own psychiatrist to examine me. He didn’t do this to puncture my credibility, as the defense wanted to do, but rather to provide me with support, and comment on the effect of going to trial. Naturally I didn’t see it this way. To me this was another invasive adult demanding that I explain myself. You want to see obstinacy? Drag a fourteen-year-old girl to a shrink against her will. It felt like I was being punished for getting raped.

I did end up answering questions, though. The person was nice, asked regular questions, and even I couldn’t stay bitchy enough not to answer. Before I knew it, it was over. The psychiatrist found that I was a healthy teenager but said there was no way to predict the wilting effects from the trauma of being cross-examined in open court. This was before the age of cameras in the courtroom, but given the laser focus that would fall on me, I would, in effect, be testifying in front of an international audience reaching millions. Larry knew that any person, let alone a fourteen-year-old, would be stretched to the limit by an ordeal like that. The rape, at least, had occurred in private. This would be public.

While I was the costar of the Rape Scandal that went on in the press, I was only a bit player in everything that went on during the pretrial posturing. One of the more grotesque scenes was the dramatic “Splitting of the Panties.” (Actually, my sister’s panties, borrowed without asking.) I didn’t know any of the details until years later. This is what Larry told me:

“When you were examined by the police, they took your rust-colored underwear as evidence. During the grand jury, the state’s forensic expert testified that the underwear had been tested, and that seminal fluid, but not sperm, was evident—a curious finding, but not unheard-of. Now, both sides wanted to test the underwear for the presence of sperm before the trial—and both sides were laying claim to the panties. Judge Rittenband’s Solomonic solution was to cut the panties in half, so both sides could take samples to their individual labs.

“The question was: How and where to cut? The stain on the panties was not regular in shape, more like a gerrymandered congressional district. The problem was compounded by the fact that the density of the stain was also not easily divisible; it seemed to be two stains, and two compounds, overlapping each other.

“So imagine—seven men, including a representative from the medical examiner’s office, Douglas Dalton, Roger Gunson, and me, staring down at your underwear—in a basement room of the courthouse.

“We argued for over an hour whether to cut the stain this way or that way, with various suggestions proffered. I wanted four sides snipped, with each side getting samples from both parts of the stain, but I was shot down. Dalton and the medical examiner’s man argued strenuously, drawing lines in the air with a pointer. Finally, a technician wearing latex gloves gingerly began cutting, zigging a bit this way, zagging a bit the other way, as he if were cutting out letters for a science fair poster board.

“Finally the deed was done, the panties snipped, with the prosecutor’s sample going to the Los Angeles County medical examiner and the defense’s sample, courtesy of Dalton, going to a medical lab of their choosing in Arizona.”

Why were these panties so important? Well, at this point everything was important, and evidence gleaned by the panties might determine whether there would be a trial, which everybody seemed to want. The judge wanted to sit on top of the inevitable international media frenzy. The DA’s office wanted to prosecute the criminal and put him away. The defense felt emboldened because of the public success of their campaign to destroy my credibility and was confident it could be extended to the courtroom. The press wanted the trial for the same reason that sharks like swimming around popular beaches. The only ones who didn’t want a trial were me and my family. My parents believed it was more important to protect me than to see Polanski get a long sentence.

The only way out was a “plea bargain.” Polanski would plead guilty to some lesser charge, get a judicial slap on the wrist, and we could all leave the whole sordid mess behind. If the facts gleaned from examining my underwear strengthened the DA’s case, Polanski might be more willing to accept a plea bargain. On the other hand, if the underwear evidence was inconclusive, Polanski and company might prefer to take their chances with a jury. Why?

Well, first of all, perhaps Dalton, Polanski’s lawyer, really thought his client was innocent. That’s possible. But even if he didn’t, he felt at that point he could win a complete acquittal. This was, after all, a he said/she said situation (the “he” being a beloved famous man, the “she” a not-100-percent-inexperienced kid). The medical examiner had found only semen and no sperm—meaning that a jury would hear the possibility that I, who admitted to having sexual experience, might have had that underwear stained with someone else’s semen. More to the point, being found guilty of any of the five more serious charges could mean that Polanski would be deported. Polanski most definitely did not want to be deported. He loved America and Hollywood, and America and Hollywood loved him right back, blessing him with the holy trinity of success in the movies—money, power, fame. In addition, his departure would mean many people would lose their meal ticket. Polanski was making a great deal of money not only for film studios, but also for a coterie of agents and publicists. He was a one-man industry. Who’d want to see that industry flee to Europe?

That’s why all the fuss over scraps of stained fabric.

In 1977, the modern victims’ rights movement was still in its infancy. The first state and federal victims’ rights legislation was five years away, and it was to be thirty years before California would act on it. Criminal prosecutions traditionally involved just three parties: the state government, represented by the judge who would judiciously apply the law; the people of the state, represented by the prosecution advocating for a guilty verdict and punishment for the accused; and the defense, advocating for finding the accused innocent. All parties seemed to be doing their jobs. Of course, I was oblivious to all this at the time. It only occurred to me years later that there was a greater significance to what we were doing in my case. We wanted to get recognition for a fourth party—the victim. Mine was a weak voice among the powerful parties, asking, “What about me?”