(Several years later, Polanski sued and won an $84,000 judgment against Vanity Fair for a 2002 article on Elaine’s restaurant where the writer claimed that Polanski had stopped by the watering hole and tried to pick up a hot blonde on the way to his wife’s funeral. Polanski was nowhere near the restaurant at the time. Oops!)
The most upsetting part of the story wasn’t the lies. It was the version of the truth they dredged up and published—the intimate sexual questions and answers from the original grand jury testimony when I was thirteen years old. Good work, Robinson. Nice move, Vanity Fair. Bet it sold a lot of magazines.
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By the late 1990s I had finally decided to come out of hiding: I did an interview with Inside Edition where I revealed my identity. This was a relief, even if it did cause a flood of ancillary articles—particularly whenever Polanski, who now had a beautiful young wife, two little children and a flourishing film career in Europe, attempted again to broker a return to the United States without being arrested and thrown in jail. But I was tired of hiding and being afraid, tired of people making up lies about me. So I figured I’d say here I am. If you have a question, ask it. If you have something to say, don’t think I won’t say something back.
The whole issue flared in 2003 when Polanski was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director for his 2002 film, The Pianist. This partly autobiographical movie about a Polish-Jewish musician struggling to survive the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II was by all accounts extraordinary (I haven’t seen it; as you can imagine, I’m not exactly sitting around waiting for the next Polanski release). But there was, predictably, outrage in certain quarters that a child rapist and fugitive would be nominated for best director. Never mind the absurdity of asking me whether Polanski should win an Oscar for a movie I’d never seen; this time, with the onslaught of calls and instructions to my children not to answer the phone, there was a great deal of upset for my children: Oh, something bad happened to Mom. Oh, now we’re all a part of it. Mom is damaged.
(The controversy had its own life, of course, but it might have been fueled by the not-dissimilar incident a few years earlier involving Woody Allen, who was found to be having an affair with the adopted daughter of his lover Mia Farrow. Mia Farrow then accused him of molesting the daughter they adopted together. He was vilified, but that didn’t keep him from being nominated for six Academy Awards as a director and a screenwriter in the years following.)
The question is this: Should a man’s personal life dictate the way we judge his work? I gave my own answer in an op-ed piece I wrote for the Los Angeles Times in February 2003, right before the Oscars. It was titled “Judge the Movie, Not the Man.”
I met Roman Polanski in 1977, when I was 13 years old. I was in ninth grade that year, when he told my mother that he wanted to shoot pictures of me for a French magazine. That’s what he said, but instead, after shooting pictures of me at Jack Nicholson’s house on Mulholland Drive, he did something quite different. He gave me champagne and a piece of a Quaalude. And then he took advantage of me.
It was not consensual sex by any means. I said no, repeatedly, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was alone and I didn’t know what to do. It was scary and, looking back, very creepy. Those may sound like kindergarten words, but that’s the way it feels to me. It was a very long time ago, and it is hard to remember exactly the way everything happened. But I’ve had to repeat the story so many times, I know it by heart.
We pressed charges, and he pleaded guilty. A plea bargain was agreed to by his lawyer, my lawyer and the district attorney, and it was approved by the judge. But to our amazement, at the last minute the judge went back on his word and refused to honor the deal.
Worried that he was going to have to spend 50 years in prison—rather than just time already served—Mr. Polanski fled the country. He’s never been back, and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since.
Looking back, there can be no question that he did something awful. It was a terrible thing to do to a young girl. But it was also 25 years ago—26 years next month. And, honestly, the publicity surrounding it was so traumatic that what he did to me seemed to pale in comparison.
Now that he’s been nominated for an Academy Award, it’s all being reopened. I’m being asked: Should he be given the award? Should he be rewarded for his behavior? Should he be allowed back into the United States after fleeing 25 years ago?
Here’s the way I feel about it: I don’t really have any hard feelings toward him, or any sympathy, either. He is a stranger to me.
But I believe that Mr. Polanski and his film should be honored according to the quality of the work. What he does for a living and how good he is at it have nothing to do with me or what he did to me. I don’t think it would be fair to take past events into consideration. I think that the academy members should vote for the movies they feel deserve it. Not for people they feel are popular.
And should he come back? I have to imagine he would rather not be a fugitive and be able to travel freely. Personally, I would like to see that happen. He never should have been put in the position that led him to flee. He should have received a sentence of time served 25 years ago, just as we all agreed. At that time, my lawyer, Lawrence Silver, wrote to the judge that the plea agreement should be accepted and that that guilty plea would be sufficient contrition to satisfy us. I have not changed my mind.
I know there is a price to pay for running. But who wouldn’t think about running when facing a 50-year sentence from a judge who was clearly more interested in his own reputation than a fair judgment or even the well-being of the victim?
If he could resolve his problems, I’d be happy. I hope that would mean I’d never have to talk about this again. Sometimes I feel like we both got a life sentence.
My attitude surprises many people. That’s because they didn’t go through it all; they don’t know everything that I know. People don’t understand that the judge went back on his word. They don’t know how unfairly we were all treated by the press. Talk about feeling violated! The media made that year a living hell, and I’ve been trying to put it behind me ever since.
Today, I am very happy with my life. I have three sons and a husband. I live in a beautiful place and I enjoy my work. What more could I ask for? No one needs to worry about me.
The one thing that bothers me is that what happened to me in 1977 continues to happen to girls every day, yet people are interested in me because Mr. Polanski is a celebrity. That just never seems right to me. It makes me feel guilty that this attention is directed at me, when there are certainly others out there who could really use it.
* * *
Editor’s note: The Times’ usual practice is not to name victims of sexual crimes. Samantha Geimer’s name is used here with her consent.
That piece created a firestorm, and the day it was published, February 23, 2003, Larry Silver and I appeared on Larry King Live to discuss it. “What happened that day,” Silver said, “both to Polanski and to some extent the American judicial system—I really think it was a shameful day.”
A few weeks later, Polanski won the Oscar for Best Director. He could not come to Hollywood for the ceremony. I never thought Roman would win, and I was quietly thrilled for his victory. It felt like a little strike against political correctness. Let’s take all of this out of the realm of what happened twenty-five years ago, and let’s just really consider the man as an artist.
Marina Zenovich, a filmmaker who made documentaries on the eccentric French businessman/politician Bernard Tapie (and would go on to make a film in 2013 about the comedian Richard Pryor called Omit the Logic) took note of Larry’s comments on the Larry King show—the idea that it was a shameful day for American justice. Marina is drawn to people who leave a trail of chaos in their wake, so Polanski was an excellent subject for her. Her documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which Larry and I participated in, was the first accurate public accounting of the case. It aired on
HBO in 2008. Initially I participated because I was scared not to: after the awful Vanity Fair story, I always tried to cooperate with the press, fearing they would make up terrible things if I didn’t. When the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah it was a hit, and I was so happy for Marina—happy, too, that she had invited me to New York City for the HBO premiere. I figured that the chance to see a movie premiere in New York would be a once in a lifetime invitation, and I thought it was time for mom to come out of hiding too. We could revisit our time in New York City in 1976, before our lives changed forever.
Once I was actually at the party, I was uncomfortable, and hugged the wall; the thought that I was at this party with all those celebrities and other luminaries simply because I’d been raped by some old goat seemed kind of mortifying. But I wanted to support Marina and the film. The way she laid it out so perfectly finally gave us a way to understand it all. To see it from the outside, not within the craziness. It brought my mother closure and comfort—and that, to me, was an extraordinary gift.
Writing about the case and Zenovich’s documentary for the New Yorker in December 2009, Jeffrey Toobin explained how fame can be a double-edged sword. “The force of celebrity had buffeted the case once more,” Toobin wrote. “It had helped Polanski by persuading his victim to support a plea deal, and by inspiring a fawning probation report; it hurt him by drawing suspicion to his legitimate travel to Germany and prompting Rittenband’s erratic decisions. Celebrity now helped by drawing Zenovich’s attention which, in turn, led to new questions about the case against him. His lawyers decided to make yet another attempt to resolve it.”
In December 2008, Polanski’s legal team filed a motion in Los Angeles County Superior Court asking for dismissal of the Polanski case, on the grounds that in 1977 he’d been deprived of due process of law. Larry was present to demonstrate my family’s support.
Chad Hummel, who’d been recruited to Polanski’s legal team, argued that Polanski’s sentence at the Chino psychiatric facility “was intended to be his entire sentence . . . so this notion that somehow there was a fleeing from the sentence is not true. . . .” He went on to accuse the judge and others of improprieties. “In our system, we simply cannot tolerate back-room communications between prosecutors and judges that influence a sentence and that cut out the defendant and his counsel from those communications. . . . That’s at the heart of this request.”
This attempt turned out to hoist Polanski on his own petard, leading to his arrest in Switzerland and the extradition proceedings. To the Los Angeles DA’s office, this was like ripping a scab off a wound. “This case is about a 44-year-old defendant who plied a 13-year-old girl with drugs and alcohol, then against her consent, committed acts of oral copulation, sodomy and sexual intercourse upon her,” the DA’s office wrote. The more accurate statement would be: It’s about a defendant who pled guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. But that did not have the dramatic effect the DA’s office needed, and I really felt the statement was intended to humiliate me, since I was not cooperating with their efforts. “Petitioner’s flight, whatever his motivations, and his failure to take responsibility for his crimes is at the heart of the extraordinary delays in this case.” While acknowledging there may have been wrongdoing back in 1977, the presiding judge, Peter Espinoza, dismissed the motion on the grounds of the “fugitive disentitlement doctrine.” Which basically means, “Get your ass back here, and then we’ll talk.”
This latest foray by Polanski’s legal team infuriated the DA’s office, and heated up a cold case. Compounding this tactical error was the fact that this was an election year. Los Angeles DA Steve Cooley, already in his third term as district attorney, was running for attorney general. (He had noisily protested when his predecessor, Gil Garcetti, attempted to win a third term after saying he’d only serve two. Once in office, Cooley apparently decided that the city couldn’t do without him.) Cooley, a Republican in a blue state, had become increasingly unpopular, and was already facing a great deal of controversy by saying he would uphold Proposition 8, the divisive California bill banning same-sex marriage. He needed to turn attention to an issue that everyone could agree on: getting tough on Polanski and making him return to face justice. A no-brainer, right? Think again.
On September 22, 2009, after finding out that Polanski would be traveling through Austria and Switzerland, Cooley sent out a series of emails researching which country had a better extradition record with the United States. They went with Switzerland, and on September 26, when he entered Switzerland en route to the Zurich Film Festival where he was to be honored, Polanski was arrested and incarcerated.
Then the silly season began. Events felt more like scenes from Dumb and Dumber than examples of our noble system at work. David Wells, the DA assigned to handle cases in Rittenband’s courtroom (though not the Polanski case), had bragged in Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired that he had lobbied Judge Rittenband to entice Polanski to come back from Germany, and then to give him a harsher sentence. While this may have made it seem that Wells played a more important part in the proceedings, he was also stupidly admitting to an ethical breach that could have resulted in his disbarment. (A DA is prohibited from discussing sentencing with the judge, even if the case isn’t his.) To everyone’s surprise, Wells suddenly announced in an interview that his statements in the documentary film were not true.
“They interviewed me in the Malibu courthouse when I was still a DA, and I embellished the story,” Wells said in an interview with the Associated Press. “I’m a guy who cuts to the chase—I lied. It embarrasses the hell out of me.”
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 maga
zine 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.
The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski Page 16