Samantha Geimer
Surprising snapshot: Roman Polanski poses with his abuse victim
Roman Polanski met the woman he abused when he was 13 in 1977.
© imago/NurPhoto
In 1988 she sued Roman Polanski for intentionally inflicting mental distress. Now Samantha Geimer has surprisingly posed in a photo with the director – and downplays the abuse she has suffered.
Roman Polanski met his abuse victim Samantha Geimer – and posed for a photo with her smiling. Geimer even has the picture on hers private Instagram account uploaded. Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner showed a screenshot on their profile. The meeting came about for an interview that Seigner conducted with Geimer for the French magazine “Le Point”.
The subject of the conversation was of course the incident from 1977. Roman Polanski had made the then 13-year-old docile with alcohol and the tranquilizer Quaaludes at a photo shoot and then sexually abused her. A charge of “rape using drugs” was later reduced to “extramarital sex with a minor.”
The director was tried in the US and later sentenced to 90 days in prison. After 42 days he was released, a deal provided for a suspended sentence. When it became apparent that the judge would not comply with this agreement, Polanski fled to France via London. In 2009 he was arrested entering Switzerland and spent ten months behind bars and under house arrest.
In the course of the #MeToo movement, further allegations against Polanski for alleged rape and abuse of minors in the 1970s were made.
Roman Polanski: Samantha Geimer irritates with conciliatory statement
“Let me be very clear: What happened to Polanski was never a big problem for me,” Samantha Geimer said in the interview. “I didn’t even know it was illegal that you could be arrested for it. I was fine, I’m still fine,” she said. For her it is more of a burden that the story is brought up again and again.
In 1988, Geimer had sued Polanski for intentionally inflicting mental distress. The parties settled out of court. Meanwhile, Samantha Geimer believes that the director has served his sentence. “Everyone should know by now that Roman has served his sentence,” she said. “From my side, no one wanted him to go to jail, but he did it and it was enough. He paid his debt to society.”
After she was harsh with him in a book in 2014, he wrote her a handwritten letter with an apology. He took responsibility and exonerated Geimer’s mother, who was then publicly held partially to blame.