Chapter 6. “I Made the Decision to Let Him Do It”

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In this chapter, we’ll try to consider only the statements that can’t be disproved, by either documents or common logic. As an experiment, we'll be taking Geimer's words for granted.We’ll see where it brings us.

Remember: it’s only what she said herself. 

And keep this important point in mind: nothing she said could have been used against her if there ever had been a rape. A rape victim can’t be blamed for the rape, whatever her previous behavior (see this chapter). No. We are going to show you, as Geimer did herself in her book, that there never was any rape, because her behavior was consistent throughout.

So, first we learn that she accepted the offer to be photographed and was fascinated by the pictures of other girls, including Kinski, Polanski showed to her and Susan. So far so good. Then that first photo shoot, on the hill.

When he asked me to take my top off altogether, I felt I had to rise to the challenge. … This was my break.

…Then I got my blouse back on as quickly as I could. (…) The next thing I knew, I was topless again.

The last sentence is regrettably vague. Did he took it off her by force, or did she just stripped absent-mindedly without noticing it? Something is insinuated here, but the only bare fact is that she took off her shirt more than once, without anything resembling coercion.

A dirt biker zipped by, and Roman looked from the biker to me. “Is that bothering you?” he asked. “No,” I said. I was a professional. Besides, breasts are beautiful; that’s what The Joy of Sex said, and I thought so.

This part agrees completely with Polanski’s memoirs. He supposed she wouldn’t want to be seen half-naked by strangers, but she reassured him. Summing up: she strips without any objections, and has no problem flashing her breasts to whoever passes by.

Now for the next session, the fatal one.

Back in the car, we talked a little.

“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.

I looked out the window. “Yes,” I said.

That was a lie. I had had a boyfriend, sort of. He had just broken up with me. Steve was my first serious boyfriend; we had dated for a few months.

…“Have you ever had sex?”

That was an odd question. I replied yes. It was true, and I did not want him to think of me as a child.

Posing topless, displaying no problems with showing her breasts to strangers, and now confirming her sexual experience; the reason given is “did not want him to think of me as a child”; although he didn’t think of her as one – nobody did, as we know from the documents, where every single witness emphasizes heroutstanding maturity – she still makes additional conscious efforts to seem older and more experienced.

“How many times?”

“Twice,” I said. That too was a lie. There had been one time. It hadn’t been particularly memorable; for me, at thirteen, it had been more like – well, one of those things you check off your to-do list.

Well, Polanski gives a different version… and Dalton insists that she had had “partners”, in the plural, but I have no documents about those others yet, so it’s only Dalton’s word against hers, a lawyer’s against a liar’s… sorry, sorry, I’ll keep my doubts to myself till later! Even though we remember than in an interview she says that she had been sexually active “for a long time”, let it be as she says. Let it be once; let it be that she said “twice”. But why, why did she?

I didn’t want to appear naïve. If you tell someone you’ve had sex only once, you sound prudish and ridiculous. Twice was so much better.

So much better for what? For a photo shoot? While her mother insists she was sure he wanted to photograph “children”? Why would one lie this way about one’s sexual experience when alone with a man? Why would one answer this question at all? Why wouldn’t one lie the other way, saying ‘you crazy, I’m thirteen!’ No, twice was much better.

The conversation turned to other things (…)I told him about a Playboy cover I’d seen. [girl in a wetsuit, “unzipped very low”] (…) See, if he knew I had seen Playboy before, he’d understand that I was quite mature.

Same question. Why, why? The “other things” the conversation turned to after they’d discussed her sex life is now Playboy. What she is saying is she was falling over herself to appear even more mature and experienced than she was.

 Then they are at Nicholson’s, she drinks champagne and poses.

I’m perched on the kitchen counter, licking an ice cube, my tongue sticking out (…)

I can be a sex kitten like the girls in Cosmo too.

…He suggests I take my blouse off. Ummm, okay.

She also drinks champagne from his glass (as per her GJ testimony), but forgets to mention it now.

He asks me, “Is this a Quaalude?” and I say, “Yes.”

…He asks me if I’ve ever had one. I say I have. This is a lie. But I think, If I say I have, then I’m someone who knows what she’s saying no to. I’ve tried them, don’t like them – that’s cool, right?

To the GJ she will too say that she’d taken them before. But in this chapter we believe what’s in the book, not what’s under oath. And the reason she gives for saying “yes” is all the more preposterous because she takes that part of the pill immediately after this, explaining it, as we remember, by “how could I say no?”, just as I quote it, in italics.

“Let’s take some photos in the Jacuzzi,” Roman says.

Whatever! That sounds fine to me.

…He asks me to get in the Jacuzzi and I’m in just my panties and he says, “You should take your panties off.”

Oh no. But well, okay, fine. There must be a reason. The panties are dark, kind of rust-colored, maybe they’ll show through the water and mess up the shot.

But then again, I want to be Marilyn Monroe. What would she do? She’d be beautiful and free in the bubbles. So let’s climb that hill, and who cares about the dirt-biker guy, and you want my shirt? Here, and I had sex twice, hasn’t everybody, so yeah, champagne and ‘lude, that’s how it’s done, take my panties, too.

I get in. I’ve got nothing on.

OK. Let’s forget that in an interview she said that she got there in her underwear – we know that she always says what seems appropriate at the moment. Let’s sum up one more time.

Posing topless, displaying no problems with showing her breasts to strangers, talking about her sexual experience and Playboy photos, drinking champagne and confessing to being acquainted with the Quaaludes, playing with her tongue, being a “sex kitten”, taking off her panties without a word of objection, falling over herself to appear as mature, experienced and sophisticated as possible… All that according to herself.

And now let’s stop and remember the important point we started this chapter with.

All of the above would have mattered nothing – just nothing! – if after this she had been actually raped. If Polanski had suddenly assaulted her and, in spite of her resistance and pleas, had forcibly had sex with her, it wouldn’t have mattered shit whether or not she had behaved as if having sex with him was everything she’d ever dreamed of. Rape is rape, and no behavior of the victim justifies it.

But the point is that everything went on just like it started! She played this part till the end, never letting him know that something was (always assuming it was) unwelcome! Let’s read on.

He takes off his tan pants and sweater. Then he removes his briefs. I look away, and I don’t look back up until I am sure he is in the water. I really don’t want to see anything. If I don’t see, I won’t remember.

In an interview she said she actually didn’t remember, and thought he was in his underwear. Silver must have helped with this bit again.

“Come here, I want you to feel something,” he says.

I knew this wasn’t right. But I don’t know what to do, so I tiptoe over.

She never "knows what to do", so she just does everything he suggests. She never mentions he ordered her about or insisted that she do something. She also says “I never felt in any physical danger” and that she knew he wasn’t going to hurt her. Why this obedience? We know that Polanski denies that he ever was in the tub; we’ll disregard his statement and just look at the Jacuzzi photos instead, as an illustration of the young lady’s curios obedience. None of these are present in the book, of course.

 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 bubbles tickling up between my legs.

“You see? Doesn’t that feel good?”

There’s nothing good about it, but I know what he’s getting at.

“Uh, yeah,” I say. Why don’t I say, “No”? Why don’t I say, “Don’t touch me”?

 Why indeed? After behaving like we’ve already seen, she also answers in the affirmative to the question whether an erotic experience feels good. She never says “no”, or “don’t touch me”. Instead, she behaves like she is totally happy to go on – or would be, if not for an asthma fit.

That’s the cunning part. Polanski in his book wonders why she invented asthma. I have to say he is too naive to understand. Well, let’s see: she invents asthma and gets out of the tub; then goes to swim in the pool, totally naked, and only after this puts on her underwear.

“How is your asthma?” he asks gently. His voice is soft, wheedling.

“I need to go home and take my medicine,” I say.(…)

He says offhandedly “Yeah, I’ll take you home soon.”

Then he tells me to go into the other room and lie down. “No, I have to go home,” I say, but he takes me by the shoulders and walks me to the bedroom, and sits me on a large red velvet couch. He asks if I’m okay. “No, I am not okay,” I say. “I better go home now.”

He assures me I’ll get better.

Now you see the point? Forget for a moment that in the testimony he didn't "take" her "by the shoulders" and "walked" her to the "bedroom", but she just "went there and lied down", we're not catching her on lies in this chapter. Look once again: she has posed topless and walked about naked, she talked about her sex life, she pulled a “sex kitten” and blew him kisses in the bathtub, she pretended to be perfectly grown up and sophisticated, she said she liked the erotic experience in the bathtub… and the only objection she ever utters to anything is that imaginary asthma! She never says “I don’t like you”, “don’t touch me”, “don’t kiss me”, she never says “let me alone” – she only says she is feeling unwell, and he understands it the way all the context has lead him to: that she should be made better the way he himself knows best. That’s why the only thing she’s been consistent throughout, in all her accounts, is that at some point she said “no”: she actually said it, but not as in “no, I don’t want to have sex with you”. It was “no, I am feeling unwell because of my asthma”. He genuinely believed her, and genuinely thought that was the only reason of her wanting to go home – which she soon stopped repeating, by the way.

What if she had actually said “leave me alone, I don’t want you”? Why, obviously: he would have left her alone. He never, not for a single moment, forced her to do anything she didn’t [appear to] want to. Here’s a bit from her testimony to prove it:

He goes, "Doesn't it feel better down here?" And he was like holding me up because it is almost over my head. And I went, "Yeah, but I better get out." So I got out.

She got out the moment she wanted to and the moment she said she would. All the time she was free to do as she wanted.

He’s kissing my face and feeling my breasts and he asks me again if I like it, does it feel good. I say nothing, but he’s a guy who makes movies, so I imagine he’s filling in the dialogue for himself.

That’s a funny take on how a filmmaker’s mind works, but anyway, she never says, “No, I don’t like it, get off me.”

He asks if it feels good, which it does – and that, in itself, is awful. I don’t want this, my mind recoils, but my body is betraying me.

Why feeling good is “in itself awful” is an interesting question, because it contradicts everything she said before about sex (how erotic experience was considered generally positive etc)i; probably added by Newman. The remaining part shows that she didn’t only pretend, but actually liked it: how else would you interpret “my body is betraying me”?

I don’t fight. Why fight?

I made the decision to just let him do it, how bad can it be, it’s just sex. He doesn’t want to hurt me. (…) We are both playing our parts.

And on that note, we’ll end this chapter. It sums up everything. She made the decision to let him do it. She behaved, throughout, from the first session on the hill, the way he couldn’t but believe that she felt like having sex with him. She never said “No” that could be interpreted as “No, I don’t want”. She did everything without a slightest objection. She never was forced or coerced (as the probation department concluded, too). She played her part.

She proceeds to tell the story of how she had wonderful sex and lead life full of drugs and sex and booze immediately after this, that is, from age 14 on. 

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Chapter 7. Contextual lies: Righteous Indignation and Implied Sarcasm

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Righteous indignation, as well as implied sarcasm, is a powerful tool of contextual lies.

Geimer/Silver/Newman team use it every time they have no arguments. When they have to give account of facts that are impossible to hide (not that, as we’ve seen, they wouldn’t stoop to just omitting a fact that is too uncomfortable), they either distort them or present them the way the reader has to believe these facts are false only because of the tone in which they are displayed.

It starts right away, on page 3.

Opinions on the Polanski case go something like this: He was a vile pedophile whose power allowed him to escape the long arm of the law. Or: He was a troubled man whose own horrific background did not allow him to gauge the difference between a child and a young woman. And the girl? She was an innocent victim. Or, no: She was a cunning Lolita. Or, perhaps most commonly: She was a reluctant but ultimately willing player in the crazy ambitions of her stage mother, who wanted her little girl to be a star.

Who was the predator? Who was the prey? We were all suspect: Was Roman a rapist? Had my mother set up the famous director to blackmail him, using her daughter as bait?

Leaving aside the not-quite-irrelevant question of why all other Geimer’s partners she had at the same time were unable to “gauge the difference between a child and a young woman”, either, let’s concentrate on the last line. In fact, it expresses the only explanation that could accommodate all the known facts without forcing them into a pattern. Cleverly positioned as it is, however, this explanation appears “refuted” by the very fact of being uttered. These kinds of decoys are scattered all over the book for the unwary reader. As if by just retelling this version she somehow provides arguments that nullify it. More examples of same:

But however persecuted he may have felt here, in Europe there was no debate: he was an extremely sympathetic figure, and it was easier to see him as a victim – if not of a malicious setup, then at least of America’s obsession with celebrity and the desire of every aspiring pretty girl to make it, however she could. And Americans – so puritanical, so obsessed with sex and sexual shenanigans!

This device works especially effectively when Geimer talks about the reaction their story produced immediately. The examining doctors, for example, failed to show enough sympathy:

“They think we’re lying,” Mom whispered to Bob.

Now we are supposed to believe that since she whispered that to him, it proves that they were not lying, and to share their righteous indignation at the heartlessness of the doctors. The doctors, let me remind you, who heard a story of rape and sodomy - and didn’t find any trace of any intercourse at all, let alone anal, - and a story of  a recent “drugging” and “plying” with wine, while the girl in front of them didn’t show any signs of either.

…the Quaalude was still in my system, and all of the Quaalude looseness and euphoria as well.

…Nobody took my blood. Maybe they just assumed that of course I’d been drinking and gulping pills. I was just another screwed-up little skank.

Much as we respect her self-pity, but… no. In this case, they would have had to test her, that’s the procedure. We have to conclude that she didn’t show any signs of intoxication, be it looseness or euphoria or glassy eyes or huge pupils – none whatever. This absence of signs fits the minuscule quantities which she had actually consumed.

The bad doctors go on asking questions:

Have you ever had sex before? And then: Have you ever had sex with Bob?

With Bob?

Now I was furious. I sat rigid with my arms folded, and spit out the answers. I don’t think I made a good impression, but then I didn’t see why I had to. I was the one who had been raped. Why was everyone asking me about what I’d done with my boyfriend, what I’d done with my mother’s boyfriend?

Because, according to her own words, she ("adult female", as the doctors defined her) was seen sitting on Bob's lap in the hallway, her arms around him, that’s why.

And there was the suggestion that I had been molested as a child, which was what motivated me to accuse Polanski later on. Polanski’s new lawyer, David Finkle, mentioned that I’d been asked by the district attorney whether I’d had sex with Bob, my mother’s boyfriend – and wondered why I had been asked that question. “Try insensitivity,” Larry shot back.

…In his autobiography, Polanski would write that at one of the hearings Gunson’s staff saw me and Bob – my mother’s long-term boyfriend, a man I considered another father – “locked in a steamy, passionate embrace. It wasn’t the avuncular hug of a grown man comforting a young girl – it was more; her leg was between his legs.”

I read this now and feel a little queasy. I did, in fact, sometimes regress with Bob; I remember sitting in his lap with my arms around him at one hearing. But the implication of this… Did anyone really report that? Did they really believe it?

Now remember what she looked like – a ripe young lady, – and don't forget Bob was not her father, not even her stepfather, not even someone who would have known her as a child, - but only a very recent mother’s boyfriend, who had only seen Samantha as an outstandingly precocious teenager.

…Incidentally, some of the articles also suggested I had been the one to bring cocaine and Quaaludes to the house. A few pegged me as a drug dealer.

Well, why the holy anger? If she was, according to her own book, dealing in drugs so soon afterwards, why couldn’t she have been doing it before? And, by the way: who did bring the Quaaludes to Nicholson’s residence?

It couldn’t have been Polanski for a number of reasons. First, he had his own, legally prescribed, Quaaludes of different strength. Next, if he had brought the ones in question, this information would have been around, as the only evidence that could have been used against him. Not only would it have been made widely known, but the charge of “drugging” wouldn’t have been dropped as easily. Moreover: if the pills had belonged to Nicholson, this could have been used to keep Huston on a leash. Instead, they used only cocaine: yes, it did belong to Nicholson, and yes, Huston was arrested (“In exchange for immunity on her cocaine possession charge, she agreed to testify for the prosecution. But her statement seemed to follow the narrative the defense was trying to create,” Geimer complains. Yes, Huston gave an honest account nevertheless; there still are decent people in the world). The most interesting part is that all the time the prosecution kept dead silence about those pills and their possible origin, and this makes it all the more probable that they were brought in by Samantha herself, who had access to them at home.

Polanski writes in his book: “She said that her sister, Tim [Kim. – J.M.] was a Quaaludes freak – she’d once been institutionalized for taking so many – and Sandra [Samantha – J.M.] used to filch some from her now and then.” Of course, that’s only what “he says”, but first, remember that he has never been lying (or at least caught lying – let’s give him the wrong side of the doubt, as usual) about anything in this case, and next, consider this: talking about his memoirs, Geimer agrees that they are mainly true. Listing the things she disagrees with, she never mentions this part.

Instead, she tries to incriminate him this way:

He seemed to have absolutely no clue he had done anything wrong – though he did try to inconspicuously drop the Quaalude he happened to be holding; the arresting officer caught him and seized the pill. That fact alone is odd, since Polanski had a prescription for Quaaludes for sleep problems. One can only speculate that maybe at that moment, it seemed too obvious he wasn’t using the pills for sleep.

Vannatter and Grodin showed him a search warrant, and once inside his hotel suite they found (but ignored) the little yellow case that held the pills.

That’s precious! Somehow she miraculously knows what they “found but ignored”. Please show me any mention of this “little yellow case” in any document, unless it’s the little yellow case that held the slides, not the pills (was it Silver who tried to make one of these objects to pass for another?), widely discussed at Grand Jury without any connection to that other, different box. But this isn’t the most stupefying yet: she pretends not to know that it was her sister’s boyfriend, Henri Sera, the very one who initiated the photo sessions, that brought Polanski the pills on that very night to be taken to a party (see the probation report). That’s why Polanski, who had his own, legal Quaaludes, now had these, the same strength that in Nicholson’s house, and if it isn’t a setup, what is it? Nice addition to the panties witha sterile stranger’s semen.

But no, the authors don’t ever speak of this. They keep using their favorite device instead:

They also knew no sperm was found. Which must have emboldened them [note this. - J.M.] to do what they did next.

[(AP), April 18, 1977:] “…Polanski pleaded not guilty to a LA County Grand Jury indictment charging him with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl (…)

“I am innocent and can’t wait to be vindicated,” Polanski told reporters(…)”

[LA Times, April 12 77]: “Film director Roman Polanski’s attorney said Wednesday he plans to ask for an inquiry into previous sexual activity by the 13-year-old girl Polanski is accused of drugging and raping.

The lawyer, Douglas Dalton, indicated in Santa Monica Superior Court that he will also seek a psychiatric examination of the fame film director’s alleged victim.

“The facts that we’re aware of,” Dalton said, “show that before the events of this case, this girl engaged in sexual activities. We want to know when, where and with whom and why those people were not prosecuted.”

… ‘I seek to ascertain if she is truthful about her previous episodes of sex,” Dalton said in his motion. ‘It is possible that she fantasizes or lies about previous sexual experiences…’

Dalton said the prosecutor, by failing to question her further about when, where and with whom she earlier had sex, in effect deprived the defense of “vital” information that could be used to attack the girl’s credibility…

Dalton’s motions quoted a statement the boyfriend gave to the district attorney in which the boy said he talked to the girl just after the alleged rape. The girl ‘is always acting and therefore it was difficult to determine if she was truthful or not,’ the statement said.”

How does she mean, “emboldened”? Of course, Polanski pleaded not guilty to “drugging and raping” – he had never done anything of the kind. Is the rightful indignation this time directed at Dalton, who was doing his job? Yes, in the absence of all proof everything hinges on the credibility of the alleged victim. Yes, her credibility was very doubtful, to say the least, what with the contradictions and improbabilities in her statements, the sterile man’s semen on her panties and so on. Yes, if we consider this case “rape”, then we should also investigate other cases when this very girl was “raped” in the same fashion; or does American justice discriminate between good American citizens and a Polish bohemian Jew? That Samantha’s boyfriend said she was “always acting and therefore it was difficult to determine if she was truthful or not” is by no means news to us by now; if anything, it’s an understatement.

But no, the authors want you to believe that everyone was just evil! Everyone, that is, except Silver and Philip Vannatter (whom we already know as one of the most notorious figures in this case):

He was the first person who didn’t treat me like I was lying.

And everybody else did! Wonder why?

[Father] was especially outraged that the defense, trying to build a case that I had fantasized the rape, was asking the court to require me to undergo a psychiatric examination.

Outraged is a very suitable word. I bet they were all outraged. Indeed: they were there with an extremely grave accusation, didn’t provide a single piece of evidence except an unknown man's semen, weaved an improbable tale full of contradictions… and the evil defense wants to make sure the accuser was not prone to fantasizing! Incredible.

Dad was outraged at the California DA for not protecting me, and furious at Polanski’s lawyer for an unjustified and prejudicial intrusion. He said that seeking a psychiatric interview of the complainant was not only something he’d never do; he didn’t even think the law would allow it.

No, really? And judge Rittenband was going to approve it, and would have, had he not been convinced that the other course, the one prejudiced against the defendant, would bring him more political gain.

Thus, instead of an independent expert, Silver brought his own psychiatrist:

The person was nice, asked regular questions, and even I couldn’t stay bitchy enough not to answer. Before I knew it, it was over. The psychiatrist found that I was a healthy teenager but said there was no way to predict the wilting effects from the trauma of being cross-examined in open court.

Ah, wonderful, a sympathetic ear at last! We might take it into consideration that this healthy teenager, indeed, at that very time was having that “wonderful sex” with a boy next door (The Girl, p.109) and had gotten a regular boyfriend (in addition to irregular ones). However, it took the psychiatrist one quick glance to come up with exactly the conclusion she (I assume it was a woman, since Geimer calls her “person”) was hired to give. Even in this case, her professional cautiousness let her only say “there was no way to predict”, which is, as you understand, true in every case, for all people, in any situation.

But everyone who has ever expressed sympathy for the wrongfully accused immediately becomes a target for the three authors’ sarcasm.

Rittenband had asked Polanski to give an account of himself. It is affecting in its very coolness; he had lived through a great deal. (…) Polanski’s assessment of himself was at least not mawkish or self-pitying. But the probation report of acting probation officer Kenneth F.Faye (and signed by a deputy, Irwin Gold) seemed to be recommending Polanski for the Nobel Peace Prize – or at the very least the Oscar’s Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

Then she quotes from the report. Yes, we’ve already read all this: the report emphasizes that Polanski is a thoroughly honest man, that he is not a pedophile, that there was no rape, that the young lady was both “mature and willing”. She does not comment on any of this: there’s no arguments she can provide. She only uses irony, her only weapon in this case. We are supposed to feel that the very fact that those things were stated officially somehow makes them dubious.

The letters of support from friends, too, tended to indirectly cast doubt on this thirteen-year-old victim and her motives. You could see the White Male 1970s Guys circling the wagons.

“There is, in fact, very little that is dark or sinister about Roman,” said Gene Gutowski, the producer of many of Polanski’s most acclaimed films. “He has remained amazingly normal and well adjusted… generous to a fault, uninterested in material gains or possession, he is a loyal and kind friend, thoughtful, and completely trusting, possibly excessively so. As a result, he has been used from time to time by young and ambitious females who felt that being seen with Roman in public or having their names linked with his in the gossip columns would lead to their advancement or gain them publicity.”

Anything sound wrong? Gutowski is only stating the obvious. Polanski is all that Gutowski said, according to all the accounts (not only Gutowski’s) of his life and character, and there’s billions of those accounts, accumulated in the course of 80 years. Or does Geimer imply that ambitious females never tried to use him, thus she and her mother didn’t, either?

(…)[Robert Evans writes] “… [the press] has maligned him terribly. He may make for provocative headlines, but with rare exception, the press has never captured the beauty of Roman’s soul.”

And perhaps more tellingly, director and producer Howard Koch: “I’m sure the situation he finds himself in now is one of those things that could happen to any one of us.”

What is the sarcasm about this time? The beauty or his soul, something everyone has agreed upon for decades? Or the obvious fact that famous men are easy targets for unsubstantiated accusations?

Incidentally, the hosannas didn’t come only from men in Hollywood. Fifteen years before she discovered that Woody Allen had nude photographs of her daughter, Mia Farrow also publicly supported Polanski.

What does Woody Allen have to do with this? It’s an attempt to smear by any means available. When there’s nothing to say (because Farrow knew Polanski personally, and being a woman could not display any gender solidarity), this trick is used to work on the reader’s subliminal perception.

As I said, my family and I didn’t care if Polanski was imprisoned. There was no value to be gained in that, and we weren’t vindictive. [no, of course not. The only value could be gained only if he stayed free, working and earning the money that would subsequently be sued out of him. – J.M.]  But to see the empathy that was extended his way, while virtually none was offered to us, was a very sobering thing.

Nice try, Newman/Silver. So, when people see a man they know well being accused of a foul crime - a man who, as Brounsberg and all others said, could not be a rapist under any circumstances – those people must somehow extend empathy to the accuser? Sorry guys. There are only two ways: either he is a rapist – which everyone understands he isn’t, - or she is a false accuser. One can’t sympathize with both either way.

The psychiatric report from Chino was, if anything, even more flattering than the original probation report. I’m sure he was an exemplary prisoner. Yet it’s pretty clear the prison officials were no more immune to the power of celebrity than the average groupie.

It is interesting how, while it takes one to know one, by the same rule one will never recognize its opposite. In prison, Polanski showed integrity, strength of character and will - all the qualities he is famous for and ones Geimer/Newman/Silver are unable to relate to. That’s why they can only impotently express sarcasm at what was plainly written by the prison officials.

Philip S.Wagner, Chino’s chief psychiatrist, portrayed prisoner Polanski as more the victim than the violator. “There was no evidence that the offense was in any way characterized by destructive or insensitive attitude toward the victim,” he wrote. “Polanski’s attitude was undoubtedly seductive, but considerate. The relationship with his victim developed from an attitude of professional, to playful mutual eroticism… Polanski seems to have been unaware at the time that he was involving himself in a criminal offense, an isolated instance of naïveté, unusual in a mature, sophisticated man.”

It’s not that I disagreed with much of that statement… but “mutual eroticism”? “Isolated instance of naïveté”? Please.

Yes, they thought that when she was drinking champagne from his glass (as per her testimony) and posing as “sex kitten” (her book), blowing him air kisses while naked in the tube (photos) and swimming naked in the pool (both testimony and book), those were strong indications of mutual eroticism. Does anyone think otherwise?

Also, isn’t it regrettable naïveté to believe that when a young woman does all this and then lies down and spreads her legs, she actually wants to have sex? It was “isolated” inasmuch as in all previous cases the experience showed that that’s exactly what ladies wanted in such situations. And how about her own statements about how good it "felt" and her body "betraying" her?

Since there’s nothing the authors can counter this with, in terms of logic or common sense, they have to use sarcasm as their only weapon.

The authors also try to make it sound like everyone has been ganging on poor Samantha, vehemently defending Polanski. They mention he said he was a pariah at that time, and comment:

Polanski’s memory is faulty here – or maybe just convenient for breast-beating.

Putting aside the simple fact that a breast-beating Polanski is a beast as rare as an honest Silver, what they say is just their old trick, barefaced lies, and it’s enough to read the media of that time or get acquainted with the mere facts to see it. To quote just one from Geimer’s own book:

That first wire service article said that Polanski had lured a thirteen-year-old girl to Jack Nicholson’s house on the pretext of photographing her, then drugged and raped her. He also was suspected of sodomy, child molestation, and furnishing dangerous drugs to a minor.

With press filled of such murderous nonsense, isn’t one supposed to feel like a pariah? I also want to remind you, just in case you forgot, that there never was any molestation count: this “adult female” (medical examination report) did not qualify as a “child” in anybody’s eyes. It’s important that I say it once again, because in all the recent media, including BBC, The Guardian and others, this count has miraculously appeared out of nowhere: obviously, to prop Geimer’s fairytales of how underdeveloped she was.

So, all this is really nothing, compared to what the media did to the poor her! If you still believe it, see this: when she talks about the Switzerland crisis of 2009/2010, she, too, quotes only Polanski’s supporters, trying to make us believe that everyone was against poor Samantha again!

Now, I hope your memory is not that short, and you remember the unprecedented smear campaign against him, not her. If you don’t – look here, we quote enough of the mad dog barking that was the main media sport at that time, and still remains, as soon as Polanski’s name is mentioned in any context.

As a nice change… Once she quotes what he says in the book without any sarcasm and doubt. Unfortunately, it’s just the part where a reader who has a heart can’t help discerning an obvious note of sad irony:

Years later, in his autobiography, Polanski claimed he actually found a certain contentment in jail, and while various stories leaked into the rags courtesy of other on-the-take inmates (including a story that he’d promised a prisoner’s four-year-old daughter a part in his next movie, with a sinister insinuation of his love for the very young), the time he passed there was relatively trouble-free. “I felt secure and at peace,” he wrote.

One can only marvel at the outstanding ability of the trio (Geimer/Newman/Silver) to use all kinds of contextual lies. We haven’t seen all of them yet; let’s go on.

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Chapter 8. Contextual lies: Distortion, Insinuation and Manipulation

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There are such a lot of wonderful ways to manipulate the reader! This book is truly inestimable: it uses them all. We’ll deal with the subtler ones in this chapter (not that we won’t have to deal with some direct, barefaced lies and other kinds of lies we’ve seen above; they are so abundant here it’s not always easy to disentangle them).

The "kid"

The "creepy old man"

My reader may have noticed a priceless trick the media use when talking about this case. They post a recent picture of Polanski, when he is 76 to 80 (depending on the year the article is published) years old, and the [in]famous Lolita-esque picture of Samantha taken by Kinney when she was around 12. The reader is supposed to feel, at least on subliminal level (though many believe it directly) that this old man had sex with this little child. Geimer does exactly the same: she keeps calling herself a “kid” and him a “creepy old man” and “old goat”. We’ve already seen how much a “kid” she was; as for him, I hope many people remember what he looked like - Martin Amis called him “a genetic anomaly”, looking around 20 when he was 50 (let alone 43). Polanski’s proverbial youthfulness and attractiveness for women must not be disregarded – not because I think Samantha should have loved him, like so many awesome women have done, but because we must be able to see through her lies every time she utters them. 

These lies are sometimes very transparent, sometimes much better disguised; in this chapter we’ll deal with the latter.

[mother and Bob] knew [Polanski] was powerful and famous and could do things for all of us.

…Mostly I was thinking: Ew, there’s this guy who’s like my size and sort of looks like a ferret. But he’s super-powerful and he wants to photograph me. Me!

This obsessive repetition of “powerful” has a well-calculated purpose. The reader who already knows that the intercourse was by no means forcible, must remember another aspect of the concept of rape: when the victim is helpless, put into a position where the powerful aggressor makes her do what he wants even without using force. In brackets, I have to say that there are hardly many situations when this kind of coercion could be equated to a real (forcible) rape, since in the modern world the woman mainly does have a choice; but even this consideration is irrelevant, because:

How exactly was he “powerful”? Although at that moment he had more money than the Gaileys, - some leftovers from Chinatown, made three years before, one of his only two box-office successful films (the other being Rosemary’s Baby, 1968), - he has never possessed heaps of money in his life. At that time he didn’t even do any producing, being only a hired worker, depending on production companies. Not a politician, not even a businessman, not a “somebody” by any accounts; just a man possessing little except his talent that he could sell as labor force.

How are his talent and fame relevant to power? What kind of “power” did he have over Samantha, or her family? How did they depend on him? How exactly could he put the powerless her in a positions where she couldn’t refuse his advances?

I cannot stop thinking, too, about the sexual norms of the 1960s and 1970s versus today. A New Yorker piece about the Horace Mann School abuse scandal I discussed earlier quotes Gary Alan Fine, a 1968 graduate and sociologist at Northwestern University. “This was the late sixties, and what we now think of as rape or sexual assault didn’t quite mean the same thing in that age of sexual awakening.” Fine said. “If you’re a powerful person and you do things that others respond to because of your power, you may convince , that they really love you and this is between two equals.” Love was not the issue in my case, but his point is well taken. The powerful are used to being wanted. They take it as their due.

What delightful hypocrisy. First, she insinuates that there are parallels between a teacher/student relationship and what happened between her and Polanski, although it’s clear that a student does actually depend on the teacher. Then she drags in that “powerful” again, which is completely out of place, and finally speculates on how Polanski was used to being wanted because of being “powerful”, which he has always been only in terms of talent and – according everyone’s accounts – the power of personal charm. It’s a fact so widely known (although getting hushed by media, especially American) that even Geimer has to admit elsewhere, “After all, Roman Polanski didn’t have to work hard to get beautiful women”; “This man had a reputation as a great lover” who “could have the most scintillating women in the world”. Yes, he was used to being wanted, legendarily so, by women of a totally different class than Gailey.

Our relationships with teachers were warmer and fuzzier [than today] – and yes, as we got older, they sometimes crossed the line. But even when there were instances of creepiness, there was generally not a sense of criminality. In fact, not just teacher/student, but any relationship where there was an obvious power imbalance – as with myself and Polanski – well,  those kind of relationships were not as frowned upon then as they are today.

The only obvious power imbalance was that she could – and did – put him in jail, twice. I repeat: what other power did he have over her? How did she depend on him?

And after repeating it, I finally see the light. Of course. She wanted to be a movie star. How could I forget? That’s what she says throughout her description of the events. How she wanted to look mature, experienced and worldly – and behaved accordingly (“played her part”) because she was afraid he might turn her down otherwise. Now the “I was afraid” from the GJ testimony, even though it contradicts everything she writes in the book, at last finds its rightful place: she was afraid she wouldn’t get to the movies if she hadn’t played her part well.

Is that called “power imbalance” or “abuse of authority”? I would call it differently: namely, she was trying to use him. That was the only “power” he had over her: he could be helpful in promoting her acting career. That’s it.

Others (like Gore Vidal, who knew the family personally and defined Samantha as a “hooker”) might consider it just common prostitution: having sex with someone (or, in her terms, letting him have sex with you) for gain, monetary or other. We’ll only say again: no, there was nothing like “abuse of authority” in this case. Just the contrary: an attempt to use a man for the family’s ends.

I thought I could read him: Give me what I want, or someone else will.

If he had ever hinted to her that if she hadn’t consented to sex with him he would have chosen someone else – that would have been coercion from his part, and prostitution from hers. But no, he didn’t! It was all in her mind. He never set any conditions. He never told her to drink. He never told her to take Quaaludes. He never forced her to have sex with him, either by force or threats or coercion.

Somehow in the eyes of media and the two other authors of the book that makes it rape.

Yes, it’s always important to remember that three people were writing the book. We saw in this chapter Geimer’s description of the intercourse. Now, apparently, Newman and Silver go over that chapter and rush to repair the damage done by her frankness, trying to represent it as if the words “we are both playing our part” meant something quite different:

There were just two people involved in my rape in March 1977 – the perpetrator Roman Polanski and me. I played my part – I was the kid who was raped. Polanski played his – he assaulted me, and was arrested and charged.

We saw what the “we’re both playing our parts” referred to: that she did not want to notify him that she wasn’t (if she wasn’t) happy with his actions: according to her own words, she decided to go till the end, “to let him do it”, even though she “felt certain I could have made him stop”.

The two other authors make quite a few similar attempts.

If I were clever or if I had put up more of a fight, or if I hadn’t drunk the champagne or taken the Quaalude or… and so on, then I could have figured a way out of Nicholson’s house before things got so crazy.

This is elegant. “More of a fight” suggests there was fight, while we already know that she “made the decision to let him do it” and felt certain she "could have made him stop"; in a word, that if the authors were in any way honest, it should have been “if I had put up any fight at all”, or better, “if I had ever let him know I didn’t want it”. The “figured a way out” is, in the light of her own confessions, a sick joke: the “way out”, otherwise called a door, was right in front of her all the time (just like the way out of the bath she got out the moment she wanted to) and all she had to do was walk out of it. The reader is supposed to forget all he has read, and believe that 1) there was some fight; 2) she wasn’t free to go away. Both are bullshit. Moreover, the reader is also supposed to believe, out of the blue, that Samantha was somehow hurt in the process, contrary to all medical evidence, or her countless declarations that she was not hurt "in any way":

I overheard a discussion about how unfortunate it was that there was no physical damage to me – especially rectally. There was this sense of disappointment. If only he’d hurt me worse, in more obvious ways, everything would be better. (…) It is disconcerting to be a young girl and know that people are on your side yet still feel a sense of regret you weren’t damaged enough.

The reader must get an idea of some vague “damage” that was there, but somehow didn’t seem sufficient to the callous examiners. Compare it to all her other statements: 

…He didn’t hurt me in any way.

…The worst part was, no-one believed me. Everybody thought I was making it up. It was so traumatic, starting that night when my mother called the police.

…(KING: Did he get rough?)
No, no. He was just persuasive.

…It was just sex. 

The authors make a sordid tour de force to justify both the allegation of her being hurt and the impossibility for her to walk away. They shamelessly compare Samantha’s little adventure to two actual tragedies. One had happened to her friend Ann, who at the age of ten was grabbed on the street, pushed into the car, driven into the woods, brutally raped and left there bleeding and barely alive.

She’d gone through something much worse than this and she’d survived. But she’d been unable to say no, too. When she had a chance to just walk with me away from trouble, I couldn’t get her to move. This time, I couldn’t get myself to walk away. I couldn’t shout, Get off me! Or What are you doing, you moron!

Now remember what you already know about what exactly happened, starting with the topless photos, going through posing naked:

and finishing with “letting him do it”. No, right, she did not walk away or shout “get off me”. Can in any way be compared with being grabbed by a stranger, or is there no end to human hypocrisy? No, probably not; here’s another tragedy they use for their purposes as shamelessly:

A male relative, an awful, scary guy, was getting drunk at nights and being abusive toward her [Samantha’s friend Michele. – J.M]. She was afraid to tell her mother. And so it continued. Several months earlier, she had seriously considered hurting herself. As it happened, it was the night I was with Polanski. For years we convinced ourselves that these two awful things happened on the same night because we had some sort of psychic bond: I was hurt, so she had to hurt herself.

Now, a girl wanting to get to the movies, and sleeping with the man who could help her in this only because she convinced herself  that if she hadn’t “given him what he wanted, someone else would”, is somehow similar to being repeatedly raped as a child by an “awful” guy, so scary Michele was afraid to tell her mother? Is that what the authors wants you to believe?

Silver gives it a beautiful finishing touch:

No matter what his crime, Polanski was entitled to be treated fairly; he was not.

Disguised as a nod towards unbiasedness, this implies that the “crime” was indeed horrible. Not something as bland as “unlawful intercourse” with a non-virginal adult female (yes, yes, don’t shudder with indignation! “adult female” is how her medical report defines her); no, probably something as horrible as what had happened to Ann or Michele.

Thus effacing from our memory the account of facts as given by Samantha herself or confirmed by the documents such as medical and probation reports (“ neither an aggressive nor forceful sexual act”, “physical maturity and willingness and provocativeness of victim, and the lack of coercion by defendant” etc), but creating a picture of a horrible crime comparable to those two, the authors will now proceed to insinuating that Polanski could actually have been convicted of rape.

…Sometime later, Dalton said that the reason the prosecution had dropped all of the other charges was that they could not prove them. You have to hand it to Dalton. Even when he lost, he kept saying he’d won.

…Ironically, Polanski should have been very grateful to Larry. It was Larry who convinced the court to protect my rights and keep me from testifying, making it possible for him to get the plea bargain. Without that, Polanski probably would have served at least a few years in jail.

…Judge Rittenband accepted the plea. It wasn’t a perfect solution – Polanski “walked” on the most serious charges – but it was a win for me.

Walked? Because the other charges were not based on anything. Please give me a single piece of evidence. Something – anything! – that could be a proof. No trace of intercourse, let alone anal, let alone forcible. No evidence of alcohol or drugs in her system, because the police, going by her appearance and behavior, didn’t see any reason to test her for those. Someone else’s semen on her underwear, which undermines her credibility beyond belief; the absurdity of mother’s and the inconsistency of Samantha’s testimony… enough? So, how exactly could the prosecution prove these preposterous charges?

No way, that’s how. It is hard to prove charges that are false, especially when all the parties included see it plainly. With their contradictions and the forged evidence, the Gaileys would have never withstand a cross-examination and would have been publicly exposed as perjurers and false accusers – that’s why Silver tried so hard to avoid trial. And that’s why Geimer/Newman/Silver now have to recur to more and more lies and distortions, exaggerations, insinuations and falsifications, even concerning the seemingly minor subjects. Every little helps their purpose.

[in his book, Polanski says] that at the time of the first meeting at our house, my mother had asked him to recommend a good agent to her, and that Bob had asked him to pass along an interview request to Jack Nicholson on behalf of his magazine, Marijuana Monthly(…).

My mother did ask for an agent recommendation. Bob did ask for Polanski to pass along the interview request. Did that imply there was some sort of quid pro quo for professional courtesies that included nookie with the thirteen-year-old? (Neither the agent nor the Nicholson interview came through.)

No, it was exactly the other way, and she has to know it. Polanski wasn’t crazy about the idea of photographing this particular girl, but he failed to help Susan (not Bob: Polanski didn’t pay much attention to that weird request), because the agent he talked to refused to represent her (a mediocre actress). After this, Polanski felt obliged to do at least something. What the authors do here is only an example of a smear attempt, just as they consistently try to cast a doubt on the genuinity of the Vogue Hommes assignment:

Polanski sat down in the living room and explained what he wanted to do. A French edition of Vogue magazine was looking to do a story on the differences between American girls and French girls – exactly why is a little vague, but it seemed perfectly plausible at the time - and he needed to find the right American girls.

Elsewhere she will again allege that there was no Vogue assignment at all, which is not only something only a very gullible reader can swallow (the assignment has been confirmed many times since), but also something that doesn’t make sense: do they mean it was all a clever plan to get Samantha Gailey in bed - by someone who had the most gorgeous women in the world? But, as we said, every little helps: it creates the necessary impression, and if it does this at the expense of consistence and logic – remember, the target reader of the book is supposed to have none.

In the same way, she dismisses his ordeal of 2009/10 (see our Chapter 7- at the age of 76 being held in prison for three months, and then under lock and key for another six, all the time remaining the target of unprecedented abuse by media) as “not exactly Guantanamo Bay”. In the same way, she pretends she doesn’t know how the media and the establishment persecuted Polanski both in 2009/10 and in 1977, or says that

[in mid-April, Polanski] with the judge’s consent, had retreated to his home in London to escape the press (I wonder if a noncelebrity would be given this professional courtesy).

- which is just plain old barefaced lie, but well calculated, again, to provoke the necessary reaction. In the same way she – pot calling the kettle black? no, pot calling the snow black, since he has never said anything that is in contradiction with know facts – says this about his memoirs:

Let me be clear: Much of what was said in Polanski’s book was true. But there were also several terrible lies about me an 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.

Notice “his crimes”, in the plural: the reader must believe that in the book he describes some other “crimes” and probably boasts them. The authors obviously calculated that theirs and Polanski’s books have different readers. Everyone who has read his book knows that, if anything, it is a very dry book, with no appeals for pity or even compassion; its main principle is understatement. Accusing a man whose life was as hard as Polanski’s of “profiting from his misadventures” in a book based on downplaying these misadventures (something lots of critics have berated Polanski for) only reveals, once again, the baseness of the accuser.

But that’s not all. What she calls “lies” is only a matter of personal perception. Doesn’t she know what lies are? A lie is what she, Silver and Newman have been using all the time, whether they are just falsehoods easy to disprove with documents and/or common logic, or emotional pieces whose purpose is misleading the reader, such as this:

No one recalls for sure when my father was notified, though we all assume it was the day after the rape. (…) I can imagine him crying (…) They were hot, silent tears, the kind a man cries when he is furious and powerless.

I wonder if he cried the same hot, silent tears when he had learned that his daughter had had sex before, or when a few weeks later she started to have it with everyone around under his very nose. But won’t she try to blame her promiscuousness on Polanski too? You bet she will; see the next chapter.

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Chapter 9. Let’s Blame Everything on Him!

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Everything we know by now – namely, that there was no rape, that Samantha, according to her own words, felt in control all the time and her only fear was that if she didn’t act sexy enough she wouldn’t be taken into the movies – is in perfect fit with what she has been saying all those long years, constantly and consistently declaring that the only thing she has ever been traumatized by in all this was the media.

…The worst part was, no-one believed me. Everybody thought I was making it up. It was so traumatic, starting that night when my mother called the police.
…I never had a chance to be angry with him. By the next day everything was so blown out of proportion.
…(QUESTION from the audience: I was just wondering, if Samantha had a daughter and it happened to her, what option would she take?)
I might consider not calling the police after everything the press and the police and the judge put me through.
…(LARRY KING: Maybe it's because of the years, but neither of you [Geimer and Silver – J.M.] feel particularly angry at Roman Polanski.)
No. Not anymore. Not even then. I mean, it just... I was angry because he was the cause of the publicity and the publicity was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
…(LARRY KING: But not angry that he had sex with you.)
The publicity was so terrible, that -- and so immediate that it just overshadowed everything that happened that night. 

It was awful. Everybody knew at school. People came to school with cameras and things were being said and printed.

…The media made that year a living hell, and I’ve been trying to put it behind me ever since.

The book seems to agree with the oral tradition. The same goes about the event itself, to which she refers in an interview as “just sex”: she tells how surprised she was to see it qualified as a rape in the media, saying it seemed “like a big pile of Awful for something that took only a few minutes.” Or “still, even though I was only thirteen years old, I just knew this was turning into something far bigger than what happened that night”

All this sounds very plausible and perfectly stands to reason. She let the jinni out of the bottle, and the outcome, due to judge Rittenband's unexpected behavior , was far bigger than the family had been able to foresee. What she says also confirms, once again, that there was no child rape, since there is nothing worse (or “bigger”, especially not “far bigger”) than child rape, and Geimer has consistently been flippant about the event itself; this alone, even if we didn’t already know for a fact that no child rape had taken place, should have been enough to bring us to this evident conclusion.

But Newman and Silver can’t be happy with this, so the book turns definitely schizophrenic. Due to their joint effort, we see poor Samantha express contradicting opinions on the same subjects. In spite of everything she has said orally, in disagreement with most of what she writes in this very book, they try: 1) to make her seem deeply traumatized; 2) to pin all the blame for whatever happened in her life on Polanski. They could have succeeded, had they been in any way consistent, or at least agreed among themselves (let alone with all other Geimer’s statements); as it is, they come up with another bizarre conglomerate which has no plausibility whatsoever. Let’s see how it all works.

First, Samantha gives an account of her life after the big event. It’s full of “wonderful sex”, partying, booze and drugs, also some small-time drug dealing.

I’m astounded that in the next few years, nothing truly horrible happened. Nobody got arrested, and there were only two car accidents.

Nobody was arrested for having sex with her all these years, either. She had sex with lots of various guys for five years before she reached the age of consent, and nobody batted an eyelash. Of course, no money or fame could come from arresting those guys. Do we have to believe she was continuingly raped all those years? Or will we at last come to terms with the obvious fact that the girl just liked sex and drugs and booze, like many teenagers have and will before and after her?  

It must have been especially hard for Silver to counteract her compulsive urges to blubber some truths time to time:

… (I) celebrated my [fourteenth – J.M.] birthday with family and a few friends – Steven, Terri, and a new boy who was vying for my attention and helping me get over Steve.

Get over Steve, you see, not the horrible ordeal she had suffered only three weeks before.

Everyone assumed that the night with Polanski was an event that would make me shy away from sex for years. That’s what people expected...

Well yes, that’s what they would naturally expect if there had ever been rape.

The contrarian in me rebelled. I met and befriended John, the boy (almost literally) next door (….) An evening of making out on the porch on April 1 led to a gift – a cross on a chain – the next day, which led to drinking, getting stoned, and wonderful sex – a first – that night. (…)

“That night”, don’t forget, is three weeks after the events. Seems like she had gotten over the trauma pretty quickly?

In that awful spring leading up to ninth grade graduation, I was intent on getting a boyfriend – and I got one.

She also describes the gang she became part of, and, through pages and pages, again and again, pot, boys and beer, and pot, and boys.

I don’t think any of us acted out because we were “damaged” by our traumas; we were just young teenagers on the prowl.

Pay attention to the above quote: Silver/Newman will have to invent a lot of tricks in order to obliterate that frank statement.

(…) Everywhere we went  (…) we were scanning the place for boys. (…) Innocent moments could turn sexual in a heartbeat. One moment we were swimming with a neighborhood boy named Tom. The next moment he’d pulled out his penis and was proudly showing it to me. I don’t remember why. I probably asked to see it. At that point, you didn’t really need much pretext for events like that.

I have quoted this part because – remember? – in the Jacuzzi episode (a product of imagination, as we suspect) she had allegedly turned away not to see anything she would have to remember afterwards. For some reason, the sight of her own boyfriend’s (and other men’s mentioned by Dalton) penis before that, or the neighborhood boy’s penis after that, wasn’t such an unbearable sight. I wonder why she inserted this anecdote here at all: deep in her heart there must be a truthful person who cries out to be heard at last. Much of what she says points at this, and creates additional work for Silver/Newman team.

Of course, I was about as likely to have a mature relationship with someone as I was to win an Oscar. Sex at that age wasn’t about connecting with another human being; it wasn’t even about orgasms (at least not for the girls – all the manuals were telling us it was our right to have them, but try telling that to a fourteen-year-old boy). And if you had sex once or twice, it wasn’t something you necessarily continued to have. It was more like this toll you paid to cross the bridge to adulthood.

I especially love this part because once again it emphasizes the idiotical hypocrisy of society. There’ll be people who’ll tell me that all those boys who had sex with her before she turned 18 did not commit as foul a crime as Polanski because they were young. For some reason it’s acceptable for some people to see a minor copulate with a minor, a clumsy boy who is by definition unable even to think of his partner’s pleasure, let alone orgasm; but at the same time having it with a man who is both physically and emotionally mature and experienced is condemnable and automatically becomes a “rape” (which it is not, by the way. It’s unlawful intercourse. Just in case you’ve forgotten).

I realize that many women who’ve been raped take a long time before they want to be touched again. My attitude was different.

Anyone wonders why? Because these other women were raped. Raped. They didn’t “decide” to “let him do it” because of the profit they could gain.

Sure, there were times when I thought of what happened, times when it snuck into my consciousness, But I didn’t want to remember. I didn’t want to be damaged.

And there’s the thing: Back then, I didn’t think I was.

No, back then, she didn’t. It isn’t but right now, while the book was written, that her co-authors and I don’t know how many other people worried about the commercial success of the opus finally persuaded her to use the word “rape” – and to convince her that she must at last, contrary to everything she has said before, declare herself damaged.

That summer was pretty much a harbinger of eleventh grade. By the middle of the school year, my ritual went like this: Mom would drop me off at the back door of school; I’d walk straight out the front door with Crystal; we’d take the bus to her house; we would hang out and smoke pot all day. [also: cocaine, Quaaludes, speed, LSD](…) I was happy to use whatever I could get my hands on.

(…) we used most of what we bought and sold the rest to keep ourselves going. (Okay, maybe we were drug dealers, but not very good ones.) I smoked a lot, tripped occasionally, did a lot of speed, and moved on to cocaine and Quaaludes. I thought all of this was a hell of a good time, and so did the people I hung around with. Maybe I was trying to cope with what happened to me the year before. Or maybe not. Maybe I just liked getting high. One shouldn’t overanalyze the whims of a teenage girl on drugs.

I managed to keep my life as a truant drug user hidden from my mother.

That last sentence is clever. Whether or not it is believable is another question. We already know why it is crucial that mother be kept out of all this altogether – otherwise, too many uncomfortable questions will be asked, to which there’s no other answer than the one given by us: a premeditated setup. Thus, we are being persuaded that mother has no idea of her daughter cutting classes, drinking, doing drugs and having sex instead of school – all that for months and months; all that during the period of her time when an allegedly traumatized (by nothing less than rape!) teenager might seem to need additional care and supervision.

Then it is an endless story of more men, drugs, nude modeling etc. Even babies don’t stop her drinking and using drugs.

Geimer tells it all so candidly that Silver/Newman can’t leave it alone. On every page you can see them crudely patching a different story over the one already told so clearly.

Their main device, expectedly, is trying to blame it all on Polanski.

I look at my diary from the time [summer], and it reads something like this: blah blah blah boy blah blah blah pot blah blah cute boy blah blah liquor cabinet.

That sounds too honest to be left alone, thus:

These entries, of course, were preceded by this thoughtful observation several months earlier: I got my pics taken by Roman Polanski and he raped me, fuck.

Note the “of course”. And now remember that before this book Geimer never considered that event as being “raped”. That she had been genuinely surprised when she learned that what happened was a crime for which Polanski could go to jail. That she has repeated over and over again that it only qualifies as [statutory] rape (that is, unlawful sexual intercourse) because she was under age. That she explicitly said that Polanski is not a rapist (Odd Man Out, 00:51:00), and what happened was “just sex”.

Looks like the “thoughtful observation” wasn’t made several months earlier, but several decades later, and not exactly by Samantha. The same way, the episode with her allegedly cutting herself (needless to say, never mentioned before in any of her countless interviews and other statements) looks so obviously added by a different pen (Newman’s?) because it clashes with everything Geimer ever said (note, too, that the alleged incident happened right after her friends’ parents forbade her friends associating with her because of her behavior).

I think my heightened interest in sex was a reaction to the rape. My reasoning went like this: If I had had to put up with a creepy old man taking what he wanted from me, why couldn’t I give freely what I had to give to someone I loved? My body, I thought. Mine. (…) I was determined to control my own life, and having sex was an important part of this control.

This reasoning could make sense a) if she hadn’t lied again: “creepy old man” doesn’t qualify as exaggeration or personal perception, given Polanski’s singular physique; 

The "creepy old man" in summer '77

The "creepy old man" TWO YEARS LATER

The "creepy old man" TWO YEARS LATER

b) if the authors hadn’t inserted this “had had to”, since we already know that nobody ever made her do anything she wasn’t, or didn’t seem to be, willing to do – unless she means her mother, of course; c) if we substitute the word “rape” in the first sentence with something better applicable, like “intercourse”.

 [next school year] I don’t think this escalation of acting out was a conscious choice, but I was angry at the world and, with any thoughts of becoming an actress dashed, I didn’t want to be a cute little child anymore.

Now we are getting somewhere. So, the root of the trauma was the realization that she wouldn’t become an actress after all. Somehow they want us to believe that Polanski is to blame for this, too.

… for now I could get on with my life.

But what exactly was that life? It certainly wouldn’t be acting or modeling. I could see the headlines: “Sex Victim Girl Gets Part on Sitcom.”

…I take responsibility for my weaknesses and my bad decisions, but I also believe that my opportunities were reduced, and my life compromised, as a result of Polanski’s rape of the thirteen-year-old me.

…Who knows if I would ever have been successful, but my ability to pursue the career I wanted was quashed before I had a chance to find out.

Curious. Because, you’ll be interested to know, plausible as it sounds, it’s a lie again, one the authors of the book really should have agreed among themselves about: only a few pages away, she says:

I went on a call for a Kool-Aid commercial.

It means she and her mother never actually stopped trying! She mentions another attempt, a few years later:

One of my friends, Vikki, was paying her way through our legal secretarial school with nude modeling – and with my I’ll-try-anything-once mentality at the time, when a photographer said he thought my pictures would sell to Penthouse, I was happy to oblige. I think it is safe to say they ended up in a magazine that made Penthouse look like the New York Review of Books. I gave it my all, wearing a smile and little else.

So, no, the fear of headlines did not stop her, either a short or a longer time after the events. She even posed naked – again – and failed to make a career again. Somehow, Polanski is to blame – again?

In retrospect, I suppose it’s obvious I was hiding my pain beneath a veneer of cool. Drugs were an escape, of course, but often no amount of smoking dope or cranking up Aerosmith was doing it for me.

It’s obvious that any delinquent behavior can be blamed on someone who has proved an easy target. Since no “pain” other than caused by media was ever mentioned, and the unlawful intercourse was in no way forced, there’s no way, however, an intellectually honest reader will believe than anyone but herself and her mother are guilty of causing it.

Silver/Newman, in their attempt of piling up as many accusations as they can (doesn’t it remind us of the desperate attempt of the Gaileys to pile up as many unsubstantiated and contradictory accusations as they could during that Grand Jury testimony?) come up with peculiar patchwork. See, for example:

It was upsetting to hear the way my sister, Kim, thought my life had changed since Polanski. She described me as an introvert, a person who only went out when she had to and rarely socialized outside the home. Was she exaggerating? She certainly didn’t think so.

This declaration comes right in the middle of describing a life full of teenage gangs, sex and drugs. Is this entirely a creation of the authors’ imagination coming to a dead end, or does it mean that the whole Gailey family consisted solely of liars, or, to put it mildly, of people who would say anything that would sound better at the moment, something we’ve already seen in Geimer’s interview and this very book?

Samantha’s deteriorating relationships with her father (not her biological father, but the man who stayed with her mother the longest) go into the same pile of Polanski blaming. Let’s see how it developed. She comes and stays with him in summer of ’77 (the summer, as we remember, full of “wonderful sex”, drugs and booze). Remember she is, according to her at least, only 14:

[father] noticed that his daughter was going off the rails, so he began instituting rules about how and when I saw John ….

My father and I had adored each other, but our relationship was never the same after Polanski. (…) I’d gone from Daddy’s little girl to this belligerent, sullen, rebel-without-a-cause, and even though he tended to blame my mother for my recklessness, I was a gigantic pain in his ass.

One day this gigantic pain in the ass comes home so drunk she vomits on her father’s shoes (The Girl, p. 178). But nevertheless, their relationship was never the same “after Polanski” – so, we must read, “because of Polanski” – not because of her outrageous behavior, for which father himself so rightfully blames her mother. Then she stops seeing father for years, and then, already a mother of three and a successful real estate developer, she learns of his death and comes to the funeral. Then we are gifted with this product of Newman’s pen: Geimer comes to her father's house and sees a picture of herself on his shelf.

He hadn’t forgotten me. I was still loved. Why hadn’t we spoken more over the years? What happened after Polanski that made me feel, more and more, that I wasn’t his little girl?

What happened – after Polanski - was that she was banging the whole town under her father’s nose, drank and drugged herself silly and puked on her father’s shoes. Looks like father was a more reasonable man than the readers of this book are supposed to be.

Moreover, in between she associated herself with all kinds of petty criminals, mainly drug dealers, and invariably chose them as her more or less steady partners. She married one of them (Kyle)

in the court house, before he was sentenced to some time in prison

and immediately after that, with her husband still in prison, started seeing another man (Dave), which proves that there had been no love involved, but only a desire for more and more drama. It is obviously a disorder, stemming from her constant inclination to acting (to which her first boyfriend, Steve, testified to the Grand Jury). This inclination is one of the reasons why she took part in her mother’s scheme so eagerly and easily to begin with – remember “we are both playing our parts”?

To sum up all her antics in those years, she muses:

Was I acting out? I never thought I was. Would I have chosen a more straight-and-narrow path if it weren’t’ for the Polanski incident? Possibly. My mother and Bob, so riddled with guilt, were only able to say yes to me.

How is this consistent with the previous statement, about mother never knowing anything? Of course, mother and Bob seem to have closed their eyes on everything; but what awful guilt could have ever let a mother condone such things as constant promiscuous sex, drinking and drug abusing, let alone drug dealing? Looks like either such things seemed normal to them, because, if we look at all Samantha's escapades with men unbiasedly, we’ll see that all she did was repeating her mother’s life, - or, maybe, in addition to it, the guilt was really there – the guilt of involving a teenager (however “mature and willing”) in a setup with everything that ensued.

But really, the life she had “after” was only a logical continuation to what she had “before”. Here’s a quote from Polanski’s memoir. He retells what she told him about herself. Remember that he had no way to know what she would write 30 years later – and see how it is consistent with the "after" behavior she describes herself:

Then came a description of what went on at her school. She said there were, “like”, two groups there. The “good people” were the squares who did as they were told. Having started out as a square, she’d soon joined the “bad people”. These, she said, were the fun crowd, who drank, popped pills, and defied authority. It wasn’t easy to join the “bad people” – you had to be accepted. Sandra [Samantha – J.M.] said she didn’t go in much for grass – that was for older folks like her mother. Personally she preferred champagne. One Christmas, while staying with her dad, she’d gotten completely smashed on it. She’d also tried Quaaludes. She said that her sister, Tim, was a Quaaludes freak – she’d once been institutionalized for taking so many – and Sandra used to filch some from her now and then.

This is corroborated by the plain fact that the “after” didn’t differ from the “before” in the least.

By the way, I am not saying Geimer did not have any reasons to actually have been traumatized. I only want to make it quite clear that whatever she might have been traumatized by was not any Polanski’s actions.

She definitely might have, as she repeatedly emphasizes (see the beginning of this chapter), been damaged by the media and the whole legal circus.

This is important to repeat once again, to finally destroy the myth Silver is trying to perpetuate – namely, that the family insisted on plea deal for the sake of “anonymity”. No, it was only because they knew they had no case and would be exposed as false accusers and perjurers.

I believe, however, that hearing the sad truth about oneself in the media – however few and far between the voices of reasons were (their number has been steadily decreasing due to relentless brainwashing regarding the case) – is not pleasant. When the media make it known that you are sexually experienced and acquainted with drugs and alcohol at the age of 13, and especially that you have served as a honey trap in a clever scheme of your mother’s, it may very well be traumatizing. The only remedy for this, however, would have been not becoming one, and blaming it on Polanski is ridiculous.

Another thing is, of course, her busted expectations. Polanski obviously wouldn’t make a new Kinski of her; on the other hand, what with the behavior of the judge the family just couldn’t predict, the scheme of quietly taking the money and proceeding with their lives got busted too: they inadvertently let too big a jinni out of the bottle, becoming for some time hostages to the legal foul play. Geimer found an elegant way out afterwards, with the civil suit, the interviews, the TV and film appearances, and finally this book; but for some time she must have really felt at a loss.

A subtler reason is something she hints on rather transparently – that she had had bigger expectations for the sex itself (which is probably one of the reasons why she agreed to participate in mother’s scheme). 

When I met him in February 1977, I knew nothing of this. I had seen Chinatown and didn’t like it. I thought it was both brutal and boring. (Of course, if I had known he’d directed and starred in my favorite movie at the time, The Fearless Vampire Killers, I would have been starry-eyed.)

This, as David Ehrenstein  has also noticed, is just plain impossible. Polanski hadn’t changed a bit since The Fearless Vampire Killers (or, more accurately, Dance of the Vampires), and if it was her favorite movie, she couldn’t but recognize him immediately. Apparently, the wish to lead you away from this simple thought is one of the reasons why she insists on repeatedly calling him “old”. So here comes a man she was “starry-eyed” about, and one about whom she knows that he “had a reputation as a great lover”, Kinski and all.

The problem is, he was not my great lover.

Yes, that’s what seems to be the problem. Her ex-boyfriend, as well as the guy with whom she had a “wonderful sex” three weeks later were her great lovers, and Polanski was not. Indeed, the process was rushed, due to Huston interrupting it by coming home so soon; also, Geimer complains he never even said she was pretty.

Later I heard that older men seducing young girls was quite the thing where he came from – that in his mind, I should probably be grateful for his experience, his technique.

But I wasn’t European. I was an American girl. And I wasn’t feeling grateful. 

He somehow failed to come up to her American expectations, you see.

Thus, they are all free to cry rape, take his money and exploit this event for decades afterwards. They can also blame everything on him. Everything. Her lack of acting talent, her inclination for sex, drugs and alcohol, her straying behavior, her penchant for drama, her following in her mother’s footsteps in that first stage of her life. Everything is, miraculously, Polanski’s fault. Even when she clearly means the media/social/legal circus that raged around her, she replaces it with one name: Polanski, as in

For me, the summer was an escape from all that was going on with Polanski back in California.

Doing this, the three authors do really incredible things sometimes.

Polanski’s lawyers had a job to do: they had to prove that whatever emotional distress I had in my life was not the fault of Polanski.

So they would bring up the crazy Nana, the drug-addled friends, even the fact that I smoked marijuana with my sister when I was sixteen.

Hey? What are now supposed to believe? That her coming with him, behaving as his lover (both Kalliniotes testimony and everything she said herself while describing the events), her decision to “let him do it” and her “playing her part”, the family faking the evidence, her “maturity and willingness” (probation report) her mother’s greed – all that is somehow Polanski’s fault? As we clearly see, and the probation report confirms, from his part it was extremely bad judgment; but how can he be responsible for her “emotional distress”, even if we agree that promiscuity and love of alcohol/drugs is a result of this "distress", and not of poor upbringing and personal inclinations? He didn’t do anything to her he wasn’t led to believe she liked.

Or are we supposed to believe that Polanski’s lawyers’ only resort was “blaming the victim”? We’ve been through this piece of nonsense here. We know that all the facts and evidence (or lack thereof) were on Polanski’s side; we also know that the truth can’t harm the innocent. Or wasn’t it true that her grandmother was mentally ill, and her aberration was of heightened interest towards sex variety? But doesn't Geimer write about it herself, about how embarrassed the family was when grandmother flirted with Bob’s friends? Also, how are drug-addled friends irrelevant to the emotional distress of a young lady? And why does she say she smoked marijuana at “sixteen”, when we know from this very book it was thirteen at the oldest?

All that is to prepare you to this outstanding fallacy:

And here’s the thing: Maybe some of Polanski’s lawyers’ insinuations were valid. Who knows? They attacked my character, and their suggestion seemed to be that Polanski’s raping me fit seamlessly into my already messy life. So really, what was the big deal? But that’s sort of like arguing, “your Honor, having her legs run over by a Mack truck doesn’t change anything: she already had a limp.”

It sounds so clever that probably some of her readers bought it. Can you see the fallacy yourself or do you want me to break it down?

This ingenious metaphor makes sense in one case, and one case only: if there had been rape. We know that there was not. The only thing that happened was statutory rape, if you must use this word, that is, unlawful sexual intercourse. The only thing the prosecution could pull was “she couldn’t consent” – but she did, and it is crucial to prove that she had done it before: it substantiates the defense case, showing that her consent was not “uninformed”. Omitting the qualification “statutory”, Silver turns the case upside down.

Moreover, unlawful intercourse is not synonymous to corrupting a child, which is a foul crime whether or not it is consensual, for this very reason: the consent of someone who doesn’t know what sex is can’t be informed. But while you can run someone’s legs by a truck over and over, you can pop one’s cherry only once. After this the consent becomes informed – and what one consents to can in no way be equaled to having one’s legs run over. Sex is a good thing, which Geimer herself constantly emphasizes. She was brought up in the idea that sex was a good thing. She had been initiated into it (arguably, by more men than one ex) and has loved it all the time since – while one can’t be initiated into getting run over by a truck, or love it.

If she insists on the automotive analogy, here’s the only appropriate one: You can’t drive a car until you are of a certain age. If an adult lets a minor drive, it is illegal and can lead to a catastrophe. But if the defense can prove that the minor had been taught to drive before, and her family didn’t see anything inappropriate about it – then nothing awful was committed by that adult, except irresponsibility: looking at the minor’s willingness to drive and aptness at the wheel, the adult in question should have kept in mind the legal aspect nevertheless. That’s all there is to it.

Refuse to be duped, guys. By anything. Lies; fallacies; ostensibly clever metaphors; demagogy.

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