Some tabloid stories/legal cases refuse to die. In 1977, celebrated movie director Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. He took a plea deal on a lesser charge, and served a short prison sentence. After that, it gets complicated, but the short version is this: faced with the threat of additional prison time, Polanski fled to France, where he has lived ever since. He's not quite in exile, since he is a French citizen, but he has been unable to return to Hollywood. The case has been polarizing because Polanski is a famous director with a tragic past, and his artistic expression has been hampered by his inability to work in the United States. Some figure that "the girl" in the story must have brought the rape on herself, or that her mother must have led her own daughter to the casting couch.

"The girl," Samantha Geimer, is over 50 now. Her whole life has been affected by Polanski's criminal acts, but, other than that, there really isn't that much to tell. After years of hiding from reporters and numbing herself by using drugs, she got herself together. Now she has a good life with a happy marriage and children.

So why should she go public now? She doesn't say this explicitly, but I think her purpose is to exonerate her now-elderly mother. Geimer claims that it never occurred to her mother that Polanski could have a sexual interest in an only slightly developed thirteen-year old girl. That's why her mother let Geimer go to Jack Nicholson's house alone for a "photo shoot" with a much-older man. Geimer also wants the world to know that she, too, would like Polanski allowed back into the U.S, not that she ever wants to see him again.

The Girl has a lot of white space, a sure sign that it probably should have been a long-form magazine article instead of a book. It's a quick read, and Geimer emerges as a likable, sympathetic character. Polanski is depicted not so much as evil but as arrogant and selfish. The reader is left with the impression that Polanski was attracted to youth, and had no particular passion for Geimer--any girl could have served his purpose. For two people whose fates have been intertwined for over thirty years, the extent to which Polanski and Geimer remain strangers to each other is remarkable. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2179897.html

It's a lucid and short book, where Samantha Geimer recounts the story of how Roman Polanski drugged and raped her at Jack Nicholson's house one evening in 1977, and her life before and after, particularly the subsequent legal battle (which she blames largely on the media-driven mentality of the judge in the case; Polanski was willing to settle on the terms agreed by her and her family). Judith Newman, her ghost-writer, has done a fantastic job of conveying Geimer's voice, and gets a deserved namecheck at the end.

I should say that I have not seen a single minute of any of Polanski's films, so I read it very much as a generic account of what happens when a famous man does a monstrous thing, rather than with any particular views on his gifts or otherwise as an artist. (On his artistic credentials, the point that struck me from the narrative was this: when he brought Samantha home after his assault, the point at which her mother and step-father smelt a rat was when he showed them the photographs he had been taking of her - they simply weren't very good.) One cannot help but be struck by the similarity of the arguments used on Polanski's behalf at the time to those used last year by apologists for Julian Assange, or by Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lawyers the year before. Nothing much has changed since 1977. ( )