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In The Girl: A Life Lived in the Shadow of Roman Polanski, Samathan Geimer, now 50, writes that she has no residual hate for the director.
“Somehow, what had happened - as bad as it was - was not going to be as bad as what was coming," Geimer reflects in her memoir, which reached American bookstores on Tuesday.
“I ran into the two-headed monster of the California criminal justice system and its corrupt players, whose lust for publicity overwhelmed their concern with justice,” she claims.
Of the crime itself, which Polanski carried out at actor Jack Nicholson's house while the director was photographing the girl for Vogue magazine, she says that “not everyone will understand this, but I never thought he wanted to hurt me; he wanted me to enjoy it.
“He was arrogant and horny,” she says.
On her first impression of Polanski in February 1977, she was apparently underwhelmed.
“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!”
Geimer also cites a 2009 letter to her from Polanski, in which the director says he wants her “to know how sorry I am for having so affected your life.”
Polanski is still wanted in the United States for absconding justice in connection with the case. He fled to France on the eve of his sentencing in 1978.
Three decades later in September 2009 he was arrested at Zurich airport by Swiss authorities, following an extradition request by the U.S.
In July 2010, he was released from a state of house arrest by Swiss authorities, who claimed that were faults in America's extradition request.
The Girl: A Life Lived in the Shadow of Roman Polanski was co-written by Samatha Geimer's lawyer. (nh)
Source: Time, AFP