A picture is worth a thousand words, and the final photo featuring Roman Polanski and his 1977 rape victim is definitely worth more than that.
The disgraced “Chinatown” and “Rosemary’s Baby” director and Samantha Geimer, who was accused of rape in Los Angeles when she was 13-year-old Polanski, recently smiled and posed for a photo together, confirming her long-established position in the long-running legal saga. haunted them both for more than four decades.
Emmanuelle Senner, Polanski’s wife, on Saturday reposted a photo of the director and Geimer on Instagram in the wake of their recent meeting and interview, which was recorded by French magazine Le Point this month. The women described themselves as a kind of kindred spirits with Polanski closely related, and thought it important to speak in “total solidarity”.
“Thank you Samantha… Image source David Geimer,” Seigner wrote on Saturday, posting a photo of Samantha Geimer and Polanski. The original photo appears to have been first posted to Geimer’s private Instagram account and taken by her husband, David Geimer.
Polanski, 89, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting Geimer (née Samantha Gailey) in the 1970s when he was 43. He fled to France from the United States more than four decades ago after pleading guilty in 1977 to one count of unlawful intercourse with a minor, after he allegedly drugged and assaulted her at the home of actor Jack Nicholson. He escaped while still on probation and before sentencing.
“Let me be very clear: What happened with Polanski was no big deal to me,” Geimer told Senner in a translated version of the interview obtained by The Times on Monday. I get arrested for it. I was fine, I’m still fine. The fact that we made this (a big deal) weighs on me terribly. To have to constantly repeat that it wasn’t a big deal, it’s horrible, awkward.”
Geimer told Seigner that she “wasn’t a 13-year-old” and said what happened between her and Polanski wasn’t shocking because so many people were in promiscuity with minors at the time.
“At the time, a whole bunch of teenage girls dreamed of ending up at Jack Nicholson’s house to have sex with the first guy they could get,” Geimer said.
The director was arrested in Switzerland in 2009, but a Swiss court eventually rejected the US extradition request and released him. Seigner said that “things completely changed” after that. Polanski has not yet returned to the United States
“From there, everyone started talking about rape, rape, rape,” Senner said. “Except that word never struck me as fitting for Roman, because I know him so well; I know he’s incapable of violence. So yeah, after that it got horrible, I felt ashamed and didn’t want to find myself facing people who thought I could live with This kind of guy.”
In response, Geimer said the goal was to “shame” and “humiliate” Sener. She told Senner that the 2009 extradition attempt was “extremely unfair and contrary to justice.”
“Everyone should know by now that Romain has served his sentence. Which was… long, if you want my opinion,” she said in the translated article, adding that the director had already “paid his debt to society.”
Even at the height of the #MeToo movement, which she calls “really, really reactionary,” Geimer urged Los Angeles authorities to end the drawn-out case for the two of them in 2017. In recent years, she’s also called for additional testimony in the case to be made public.
Last summer, unsealed court transcripts revealed that a Los Angeles County judge only intended to sentence Polanski to 90 days in prison for Geimer’s sexual assault, boosting the director’s chances of finalizing his fugitive status.
The mother-of-three also spoke about the case in her 2013 memoir, Girl: A Life in Roman Polanski’s Shadow. She recounts her alleged events in the book and says she feels further wounded by what she calls the “victim industry”: the lawyers, judges and journalists who she feels have dramatized her case for their own benefit.
“You shouldn’t be able to make what happened to me worse, so it’s more interesting,” Geimer told The Times then. “You have to feel bad and be a victim so that others can use you as they see fit.”
I repeated this view with Sener.
“I am persevering,” she said, “but the truth is, people don’t want to hear the truth when it doesn’t fit their goal.”
Geimer said she wasn’t very optimistic about changing the media’s perspective.
She said, “I’ve been trying to get people to listen to me for a long time. And things seem to be getting worse,” to which Senner replied, “We have to change things, they have to be. We’re two now. We’re stronger.”
Polanski continued to regularly direct films to critical praise, but over the years at least six other women have accused him of sexual assault, most of whom said the abuse occurred when they were minors. None of these allegations resulted in criminal charges, and he denied through his attorneys any wrongdoing in those cases.
The director, who was nominated for five Oscars, was expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and stripped of his directing Oscar for “The Pianist” in 2018. His case, along with that of two-time convicted movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, has been repeatedly raised during the Academy’s recent crackdowns. on the behavior of its members.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.