The woman at the center of the ROMAN POLANSKI rape scandal has released a book detailing her harrowing experiences.
Now, 50, Samantha Geimer saw her life come crashing down in November, 2009, when exiled Hollywood director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on a decades-old warrant for the sexual assault of a teen.
Though she’d been happily living in obscurity, she was the woman, now 50, who Polanski had raped thirty-seven years ago. Now, four years after her past smashed into her present life, Geimer decided to tell her story about the alleged sexual assault in new book, The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski.
Samantha and the acclaimed Polish auteur met when he asked Geimer’s parents if he could photograph their daughter, 13, in a test shoot for French Vogue.
“My mom gently suggested she come along on the shoot,” Geimer writes in the book. “There was a long pause. ‘No,’ Roman said, her presence might make me uncomfortable and unable to relax in front of the camera. She didn’t fight him; there were already stories about Brooke Shields crazy controlling stage mother, and she certainly didn’t want to be that.”
After an uncomfortable test shoot where Polanski pressured her to pose in the nude, she claims Polanski felt the shoot was “not working” and requested she remove her shirt. She explains, “I felt I had to rise to the challenge … I was a professional.”
Soon after, she writes, “My ticket to stardom showed up again. … Sure the last time was super-uncomfortable, but that was the price of fame.” He offered to do another shoot with Geimer at Jack Nicholson ‘s L.A. home and she readily agreed.
On the way over, Geimer says, Polanski asked her if she had a boyfriend and if she had ever had sex. When she answered “Yes … twice,” to the latter, she claims, “Roman stopped asking questions.”
Upon arrival at the house, Polanski pulled a bottle of champagne from the fridge. Almost immediately after serving Geimer, she says, Polanski asked her to take off her top, and again, she agreed. “He refills my glass,” she writes. “I drink more. He keeps refilling … I’m aware I have a little buzz going. … My glass never gets empty.”
Polanski told her to get into the Jacuzzi in her panties, she says, and soon produced a Quaalude tranquilizer which after some prodding, Geimer ingested.
After taking a few shots of Geimer in the Jacuzzi, Polanski announced the light was insufficient, Geimer says. “He puts his camera down and says he’s getting in,” she remembers. “He’s getting in. I’m fine with taking off my top … But this? No.”
“I want out. Now,” she writes. “How f*****g stupid could I be? It’s a hard thought to hold on to. The water is hot, and the steam is rising into the night … I knew this wasn’t right … He pulls me a little closer by the waist and helps hold me up a little and moves me above one of the jets so I can feel the bubble tickling up between my legs. … There’s nothing good about it, but I know what he’s getting at.”
“Then everything hits at once,” Geimer recalls. “The steam, the heat, the alcohol, the pill and the panic. Have you ever been touched in a way that made you want to jump right out of your skin? This man had a reputation as a great lover. The problem is, he was not my great lover. I could have been any girl, as long as I was female and as long as I was young.”
Feigning asthma, Geimer climbed out of the Jacuzzi and asked to go home, but Polanski allegedly would not be deterred.
“He holds my arms at my sides and kisses me,” she writes. “And I say, ‘No, come on,’ but between the pill and the champagne it’s like my own voice is very far away.”
Then, he began to perform oral sex, she says. “I don’t want this, my mind recoils, but my body is betraying me.
“And that’s when I check out. I go far, far away,” Geimer writes. “There is a sense of complete and utter emptiness.”
That night, Geimer told her family and police what had happened.
Polanski was then arrested and charged in L.A. with rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious acts upon a child, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. Upon learning he was likely to face imprisonment; he fled to France and later to Switzerland.
Despite a US attempt in 2009 to extradite him, Polanski remains at large in Europe shuttling between France and Switzerland. Ironically, the cover image of Geimer’s book was taken by Polanski himself.
