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

Why did he choose to admit to lying now? Well, he was retired, so presumably had nothing to lose. But surely there must have been pressure from his pals in the DA’s office.

This judicial malfeasance was part of Polanski’s case that the court was treating him improperly, even illegally. So when Wells claimed he had lied in the documentary about having acted unethically, he was in fact weakening Polanski’s case for returning without additional punishment. That seemed to be the idea, anyway.

But the DA’s office wasn’t through with their propaganda. To strengthen their case, they needed Polanski to look not like a rapist, but a serial rapist. Enter television personality/attorney Gloria Allred. On May 14, 2010, she was on television (as usual), an attractive woman by her side. My initial thought was, “For goodness sakes, how many mistresses did Tiger Woods have?” But then I got a shock.

Allred’s press conference was with Charlotte Lewis, a British starlet and Playboy model who’d had a small role in the Polanski production of Pirates . Lewis claimed that Polanski had sexually abused her “in the worst possible way” when she was underage in Paris. (She was sixteen at the time of the incident, which is legally not underage in France.) “He took advantage of me and I have lived with the effects of his behavior ever since it occurred,” said Lewis, reading from a prepared statement at a news conference in Allred’s office. “All I want is justice.” Then Allred invited anyone else who’d been abused by Roman to contact her. Of course.

I had several thoughts. The first one was cautionary for Ms. Lewis. I know how this all works: someone convinced you that this was a great idea, that you needed to do it. But I know what comes next. This publicity will turn around and bite you. In a few weeks the press will be reporting terrible things about you. Nobody walks away from this unscathed. Gloria Allred and the DA are just using you, and you are probably going to be sorry you let them.

My second thought was toward the other “victims” Ms. Allred was inviting to step forward. I hoped there were none, but if people did step forth, all the questions and accusations would begin: this one wasn’t underage, this one wasn’t non-consensual… the press would be parsing everyone’s morality and motives… and mine would be lumped together in the “questionable” pile.

And that, more or less, is what happened. Another woman interested in justice—Edith Vogelhut, a former model and magazine editor—came forward with the claim that in 1974, when she was twenty-one, Polanski handcuffed her at a party at Jack Nicholson’s house and sodomized her repeatedly. “I kind of knew we were going to have sex,” she said, but “did not expect to be sodomized.”

“I see this naked Roman Polanski walking to me with these two brandies,” she says, adding that they also smoked pot and that he gave her ecstasy before handcuffing her. “He grabs me by the hair, jerks my head up, snaps amyl nitrate under my nose, and enters me anally,” says Vogelhut. “I hurt. This was rape.”

You know what? I wasn’t there; I don’t know what happened. No one should be forced to have sex against their will, and everyone has the right to say no. But why wait so long to accuse Polanski, and then only with the glare of the spotlight on them?

I’m not making a judgment; Edith Vogelhut’s experience sounds awful. But if she was so heinously abused in 1974, as an adult, where was she when I was being called a slut and a liar in 1977? Moreover, I couldn’t help thinking at the time, Why would anyone want to be a part of this? (It was reported that she was trying to sell a book.)

And as for Charlotte, soon after her accusation, the retribution followed. It was reported that in a 1999 interview with the British tabloid News of the World, Charlotte Lewis had stated that she’d been Polanski’s girlfriend for six months after the shooting of Pirates, adding, “I knew that Roman had done something bad in the United States, but I wanted to be his lover.” Implying of course that she was untruthful about the abuse; some reports I read questioned her character.

Here’s the thing: There are some experiences that are genuinely impossible to get past. At the same time this circus was going on, Amber Dubois’s parents were weeping at the sentencing hearing for the man who had brutally murdered their daughter. Will they completely recover? I doubt it.

This is so different. We’ve all done something in our lives we regret, something that is stupid; or something awful and stupid is done to us. For 90 percent of these situations, there comes a time when you need to let it go—unless you don’t want to. And then, in a sense, it’s your problem.

Why was the State of California interested in spending time and resources to extradite Roman Polanski? Has the DA cleaned up all the drug and gang violence in California? No more problems with illegal immigration? Are they releasing thousands of criminals just to make room for him? Was it not obvious to everyone that the DA was doing this as a means of furthering his own career, with utter disrespect and disregard for the victim in this case? He is doing the opposite of his job.

Because of his fame, Polanski had been lied to and manipulated by our criminal justice system. This notoriety drew corrupt and venal people to him like moths to a flame, from the judge on down. Celebrity can be a benefit and a curse. There is massive privilege, but that privilege and attention can easily backfire on you, too, as we see almost daily. Maybe if Polanski had been a nobody he would still have gotten the case pleaded down, been sentenced to six months for unlawful sex with a minor, and served two or three months—exactly as he did. But he wasn’t a nobody; he was somebody whose fame and power made everyone involved with the case worry about themselves in relation to it. Who would seem tough? Who would seem like a pushover? Who could use the case for professional or personal gain?

And here’s the big issue: Who, exactly, would be served if Roman Polanski went to jail? True, this was a man who liked inappropriately young girls. Hell, he eventually married a remarkably young girl—Emmanuelle Seigner, who was only twenty-three when they wed in 1989 (he was fifty-six). But he was not a pedophile; he was not hanging around schoolyards. He was not violent, he was not rough; he was, mostly, a selfish, arrogant man—and one who was not even a complete outlier given his place and the cultural moment.

I was reminded of who Roman Polanski was in those days when I read Peter Biskind’s seminal book on Hollywood from the late 1960s through the 1970s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood . Peter Bart, the Paramount producer who worked with Polanski on Rosemary’s Baby, called him “a brilliant man, the best read, most cultured director I have ever met in my life. But… he was always at the edge of the flame.” Life was not making sense to him. He went for the pleasures that were a sure thing. One of those pleasures was young girls. Robert Towne, Chinatown screenwriter, talked about rewriting the script with Polanski at a hotel, and how they would fight “over the teenyboppers that Roman would run out and take Polaroid pictures of diving off the fucking diving board without tops on. Which was distracting.”

Over and over I’ve been called a Polanski apologist, with the implication that I have been manipulated into taking his side by nefarious people in positions of power. I am not apologizing for him and I didn’t think his art somehow makes up for what he did. (Full disclosure: I don’t even like his movies.) Mostly what I am is a person with common sense and a belief that motive does play a role in judging a crime. Roman Polanski was a man who was horny and high on March 10, 1977. That’s it. I do not think his motive was to hurt me, even if, unavoidably, he did. I consider the integrity of our justice system far more important than the punishment of one man, for one crime, even if I was the victim.