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

And worse than that: I had never told Dave. I told him now—and had to explain. Being three years younger than I was, he was only ten when the story was all over the news. He’d heard of it, but it wasn’t a big deal in his world. Until now. When he wasn’t trying to charm a cute girl, Dave was a man of few words. He said little, but I knew he felt a great deal.

The story said:

Sex scandal girl Samantha Gailey has blocked hopes of a return to America for exiled film director Roman Polanski. The controversial film director fled to Paris 11 years ago to escape justice for having under-age sex with the young beauty.

Samantha, shown right in an exclusive Sunday Mirror picture, will never let him forget the drunken, drug-crazed sex session he inflicted on her when she was just 13 years old.

And despite a recent campaign waged by Polanski’s Hollywood superstar friends to bring him back, the long-limbed blonde still says no.

“He’s not coming back,” said Samantha. “Over my dead body. This is my town, not his, and there is no way he is coming home….”

The paper completely fabricated a quote from Larry: “We will oppose his return as long as I live. Can you imagine growing up with what she has had to grow up with?” And then, it concluded: “… Samantha still lives with her mother, trying to free herself from the long shadow cast over her by the sordid affair.”

To my surprise, the picture taken of me was quite lovely, but the text told another story. In this piece I was bitter and resentful, an emotional cripple who still lived with my mother. For good measure the other photo in the article was a lingerie shot of Emmanuelle Seigner, the then twenty-one-year-old French model/actress of unsurpassable beauty whom Polanski was due to marry. The article suggested that Polanski thought it was time to “forgive and forget,” and that a new marriage would pave the way for his return to the United States—as if marriage covered rape like paper covering rock.

It was a slap to him and his fiancée, in a way, the idea that he was marrying for PR purposes. Worse to me, however, was the idea that somehow my life was defined by my experience with Polanski. And this was as I felt my life coming together for maybe the first time. I was furious. I was just getting back on my feet; life as I imagined it was just beginning. And again the invasion of privacy, the vomiting up of all the awful memories.

I decided to call Larry. Surely there was something he could do.

But shortly after the tabloid published the story, two things happened that made me shelve my anger for a little while. First, I discovered that I was pregnant. And then, my mother, who actually had bought a place in Kauai, officially invited us to move with her—and we’d get six months’ free rent.

There was nothing really holding us in California, and for Dave, who was from Van Nuys, moving to Kauai was a dream. I was nervous, but how could I say no? We had no idea what to expect and thought we were moving to the middle of the jungle (which, it turns out, we did, albeit one with a 7-Eleven and a few other stores).

I had been wavering about making such a radical move, but this article clinched it. I would never get away from reminders of what had happened if I stayed in Woodland Hills. It wasn’t just the pervasiveness of physical reminders—the old partying pals who knew my story; the suburban tract house where I’d arrived that night, strung-out and spent; the homes and hills and bars where I’d tried to lose myself. It was Los Angeles itself. There was something about being in a culture where attention-seeking is the norm, where the desire for fame is in the thoughts and aspirations and sweat of just about everyone you meet, that always made me flash back to Polanski.

It was time to take Dave, Jes, and my pregnant self and start over in the beautiful anonymity of Hawaii.

In October 1988 I moved to Kauai, the oldest of the Hawaiian islands and arguably the most beautiful. Over the years dozens of movies, from South Pacific to Jurassic Park to The Descendants, have been filmed there. When I moved there in 1988 it was an unspoiled almost-wilderness, though in more recent years it has become a retreat and sometime second home for many people in the entertainment industry. (That celebrity-friendly vibe is meant to be part of its charm, but not to me; I am still suspicious and uncomfortable around people in the entertainment industry.) But if today it is the kind of place where people like Bette Midler and Sylvester Stallone can go grocery shopping undisturbed, back then it was also the kind of place where I could go undisturbed. Kauai is also a haven for people who want to get off the grid—the perfect, gorgeous country setting where you can have one or two little secrets and nobody knows—or if they know, they don’t care. There is also, as I was soon to learn, a small-town mentality of “we take care of our own.” There are the locals, and there is everyone else. If you live there, your neighbors have your back.

Dave and I got married in December 1989, when our son Alex was almost one. I was twenty-six; Dave was twenty-three. I was busy with my two sons, and Dave was finding a variety of jobs in this strange new world. We were happy.

There is also something about island life that seems to slow down time and encourage reflection. With the space to think, I realized that in my life of “look away,” there was one thing I’d avoided above all else. I’m not a vindictive person by any means. I am still friendly with ex-lovers and ex-husbands; I am deeply grateful to and loyal to old friends, and I don’t dwell on past fights or insults. (In fact, I have the very good fortune to have a lousy memory for that stuff.) I knew that Roman had written an autobiography. I was in it. And my family. And I had heard it wasn’t flattering, to put it mildly. I didn’t even want to buy it, so I finally asked Larry to send me the part of the book that pertained to me. I read it.

It’s important to understand this. Back in 1978, after we requested that the most serious charges against Polanski be dropped, my family and I were harshly criticized: Did those people only report his crimes so they could get money through a civil suit? Larry had to state over and over again that there would not be a civil suit. After all, he said, the goal was to protect my anonymity, and a lawsuit would destroy that. So I’d always thought back on that criticism, and always thought that I would not give anyone the satisfaction of thinking that the reporting of the rape was a play for money down the road.

But then, years after Polanski had published his autobiography—and after several other biographies of Polanski had come out, more or less restating his perspective of March 10, 1977—I’d had enough. Whatever hesitation I’d had over the years was gone.

Let me be clear: Much of what was said in Polanski’s book was true. But there were also several terrible lies about me and my family—about my mother being flirtatious, about there being an unspoken erotic frisson between me and Roman, and so forth. You can call them misperceptions all you like; they’re still lies and they hurt. With his autobiography, he was profiting from his misadventures and attempting to rationalize his crimes; there was a certain level of swagger and arrogance in it all. I decided to take control of a situation that had been out of my control for a long time. Still smarting from my appearance in that tabloid and having now read what Roman had put into print about me and my family, I decided to sue him for sexual assault in civil court.

My decision to sue was not impulsive and did not come easily. I knew that no matter how blameless I was, I risked looking greedy. Did something bad happen to you? Make some money! It’s the American way! Also, the civil law system can be just as byzantine and arbitrary as the criminal one. There are no guarantees of fairness there, either. But it was starting to seem that it was the only chance of getting Polanski’s voice muted. The suit was my way of saying, “Roman, shut up.”