This blog is dedicated to the greatest man of our time, Roman Polanski, outstanding film director and equally outstanding, though much slandered, person. The deeper I go into the details of his life and work, the more I admire him, and the stronger my determination to do all I can to clear his name, and help him get back the respect and honors he truly deserves. Luckily, all the necessary documents, transcripts and other proofs are readily available nowadays, as my readers will soon be able to see. Not all of the blog will be about the unfortunate 1977 case: this would be unfair. I will post news, thoughts, and my reviews of his films. 

The Girl: Geimer's "Memoir"

1. The Girl Who Couldn't Say 'No"
2. Lies, Damn Lies, and Samantha the Prepubescent
3. 'Victim Blaming' and 'Rape Apology'
4. A Dozen Impossible Things Before Breakfast
5. Liar, Liar, Panties on Fire!
6. "I Made The Decision to Let Him Do It" - Taking What She Says for Granted, As an Experiment
7. Contextual Lies (1): Righteous Indignation and Implied Sarcasm
8. Contextual Lies (2): Distortion, Insinuation, and Manipulation
9. Let's Blame Everything on Him!
10. Shamelessness
11. Separating the Truth from Lies

Chapter 1: The Girl Who Couldn’t Say ‘No’




Polanski and Kinski in '79
Gailey in '77
Well, at last I was able to read Geimer’s notorious memoir.

I am happy to tell you right away that the description of the main events, those of March 11, ’77, are given by Geimer in a way that does not differ from the analysis of the documents we gave here. What we deduced from the documents was the obvious, plain story of a young girl (defined by her medical examination report as "adult female") who, having had previous experience in sex, drugs and alcohol, of her own accord went with a famous man, of her own accord posed topless, told him about her sexual experience, drank some champagne and took a tiny part of a popular recreational drug, posed naked, swam in the pool naked, - altogether behaved, in accordance with a witness’s (Helena Kaliniotes’s) account, like his lover - and finally had sex with him without being forced or coerced. In a word, our conclusion was the same as that of the probation department, the only document that gives an official conclusion of what the crime of the century was:

The offense occurred as an isolated instance of transient poor judgment… The provocative circumstances, permissiveness and knowledge of circumstances by mother, physical maturity and willingness and provocativeness of victim, and the lack of coercion by defendant… all contribute to the above impression…

We also remember that the only thing the prosecution had to grab onto was her “I was afraid” statement. During the Grand Jury interrogation, the Jury fall over themselves to avoid asking any uncomfortable question; still, when someone says things like “I went to the room and lied down”, this someone has to be asked why she did it. Then she comes up with “I was afraid” (“What were you afraid of?” – “Him”), and the Jury never tries to go into it any deeper, to find out what exactly he said or did to inspire fear, or why she thought if she just hinted at resistance he wouldn’t stop immediately (we’ll presently see that she never did anything to discourage him). Now we know the answer to this unspoken question: Nothing. And no, she was not afraid.

“I never felt in physical danger”
“I never thought he wanted to hurt me; he wanted me to enjoy it”.
“It’s just sex. He doesn’t want to hurt me. (…) We are both playing our parts.”

We also – finally! - learn that she actually knew that she was in control of the situation:

I felt certain I could have made him stop.”

There’s nothing new about that, of course – compare with Geimer’s earlier statements:

He wasn’t hurting me, and he wasn’t forceful or mean or anything like that.
(2000, interview for A&E Television Networks documentary)
It was just sex.” (Larry King interview, 2010)

etc., but still it’s nice to have it confirmed once again, just like it’s nice to see the fact that she never put up anything that resembled resistance once again emphasized:

…How can I say no?
…So let’s climb that hill, and who cares about the dirt-biker guy [I’ll explain this part later  - J.M.], 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.
…Why don’t I say, “Don’t touch me”?
…I don’t fight. Why fight?
…I made the decision to just let him do it.
…Why did I drink? Why did I take the Quaalude? I felt certain I could have made him stop.
…We are both playing our parts.

What is a pleasant surprise, however, it’s that Geimer went as far as to admit that she actually enjoyed it:

He asks if it feels good, which it does
My body is betraying me.”

and to explain why she personally didn’t, and doesn’t, see anything wrong about early sex:

if you were anywhere from thirteen to forty-five in the 1970s – you could understand (…) there was something considered generally positive about erotic experience then, even in the absence of anything beyond the sex itself. The idea was that emotional growth came about through an expanded sexuality...

So, will we finally settle on this? The “rape” case – the one which never existed in reality, since the only thing Polanski was officially charged with after the investigation is “unlawful sexual intercourse”, but which still prevails in people’s minds and media rants – is closed at last?

Fat chance. In spite of all you’ve just read… she – guess what? She keeps calling it “rape” in every passage of the book. Even more astounding, because all those years she was very careful never to call it so, and quite recently, in one of her TV appearances, emphasized that it can only be called “rape” because she was under age. And, in spite of all of the above, which might give one hope that she finally decided to tell the truth and shame the devil – she piles up new lies atop the old ones.

Let’s not forget: the book has three authors. Apparently, Geimer is trying to tell the truth, as seen above (and more will be seen below); then Judith Newman comes and adds all the poor innocent victim stuff, not caring that it clashes with the rest; then Lawrence Silver, Geimer’s lawyer since ’77, inefficiently tries to connect the loose ends, which makes the fraud all the more obvious.

The whole aggregation reads like the authors take their readers for imbeciles (the word “fools” is too mild in the face of their concoction). They make you their sitting ducks. They use all kinds and types of lies, so profusely that a textbook could be made. We are presently going to analyze them one by one.


Chapter 2. Lies, Damn Lies, and Samantha the Prepubescent


So, how can a book one of whose authors is a lawyer seriously describe consensual sex for pages and pages, and then as seriously call it “rape” throughout the volume?

Easy. Remember that another name for “unlawful sexual intercourse” is “statutory rape”? It’s not universally accepted, and not really an official legal name, but still it exists.

The “statutory” qualification is omitted in the book. To be able to do so without letting any questions appear in the mind of the reader, the authors recur to barefaced lie.

Definition: A barefaced (or bald-faced) lie is one that is obviously a lie to those hearing it.

If my reader knows anything about the case, s/he can’t help remembering one crucial thing: the young Gailey was outstandingly mature, and everyone (including the law officers) described her as looking about 18 years old; the medical investigation report, too, defines her as “adult female”.

Now, from the book, we suddenly learn the opposite.

…And then there was me, a thirteen-year-old kid in jeans and sneakers, barely developed, wearing a bird.
…Looking back on it, I still marvel that he didn’t turn on his heel and walk out the door. Was he really looking for pre-pubescent girls for a photo shoot, or was the photo shoot a good excuse?
…[Jacqueline Bisset] offered me a glass of wine. I said no. Later, she said she was appalled she had offered liquor to a minor – that she hadn’t known my real age. If you look at the photos from the time that seems implausible, but then again, maybe she just assumed Roman wouldn’t be palling around with a thirteen-year-old.
…Didn’t this woman [Anjelica Huston] think it was weird, her friend Roman coming here with a kid?
…I was the kid who was raped.
…while I looked younger than thirteen at the time of the assault

OK then, let’s listen to witnesses:

Adult female” – her medical report.

The witness [Kalliniotes, the housekeeper, who poured Samantha champagne] stated… she thought she was approximately 18 years old” – probation report, pages 12-13

Here is what the woman who was supposed to be surprised at “Roman coming here with a kid” said:

She appeared to be one of those kind of little chicks between – could be between any age up to 25… You know, she did not look like a 13-year-old little scared thing, you know. She seemed quite tall to me… she seemed pretty well developed girl. I would have not thought that she was 13.… I would say anywhere, you know, between 18, around that age, up, late teens she looked to me.” – Anjelica Huston, quoted by probation report, page 13-14

Now the two people who can’t be suspected of any sympathy for Polanski:
“[The arresting officer, sergeant Vanatter] described the victim as looking between 16 and 18 years old” – probation report, page 20

A well-developed young girl who looked older than her years, and regrettably was not unschooled in sexual matters”; “not an inexperienced and unsophisticated young girl” – Judge Rittenband quoted by The Spokesman-Review - Sep 20, 1977

How pre-pubescent does all that sound?

And finally, as Geimer requested, let’s, indeed, have a look at the photos of the “pre-pubescent” “kid”:






That attempt at hiding this obvious fact is so preposterous that it might as well come under “Big Lies”:

Definition. Big Lie: A lie which attempts to trick the victim into believing something major which will likely be contradicted by some information the victim already possesses, or by their common sense. When the lie is of sufficient magnitude it may succeed, due to the victim's reluctance to believe that an untruth on such a grand scale would indeed be concocted.

Did she (or, rather, they – I smell Silver here) really believe that if they said it loud enough it would become the truth? They don’t stop at plain barefaced and big lies, however, but add new approaches to same. For example, misleading.

…Sure, my breasts were so small I could still wear undershirts
…I don’t need to take off my bra, because I am not wearing one. The truth is, I don’t need one.

Definition: A misleading statement is one where there is no outright lie, but still retains the purpose of getting someone to believe in an untruth.

Whether or not a female in the 70s is wearing a bra has nothing to do with her being or not being “pre-pubescent”. This bra statement is, however, repeated a few times, to imprint in us clearly the image of a “kid”.

The following is even better:

When asked why the photographs seemed so amateurish, Polanski explained to friends that they were intentionally blurred, as though taken on the fly. He was inspired, he said, by the British-born photographer David Hamilton, whose dreamy, grainy, often-nude photos of prepubescent girls – ten, eleven years old – were at that time all the rage.

Here the authors kill an amazing number of misleading birds with one foul stone. First, they try to hint that the photos were not all that good because they were only a pretext (presumably, for “raping” her pre-pubescent self and thus ruining his own life), as if Geimer didn’t know that her family persuaded Polanski to take the photos. Next, they suggests that they have some (unquoted) sources of knowing what Polanski said to his friends. And finally, they want everyone to believe that Geimer at that time could have some resemblance to a “ten, eleven”-year-old.

I can easily imagine Silver try to come up with something that would counter the effect of the photos, should they leak (no need to worry too much: most of them can be rarely seen except here, or in the two Zenovich films) and shatter the “looked younger than thirteen” feeble lie. It’s not an easy tasks, and all they all together manage is:

Before we learned there wouldn’t be a trial, my mother was very worried: I had grown and looked a lot older in the course of the year, and she felt that while I looked younger than thirteen at the time of the assault I really could now be mistaken for a teenager who was at least sixteen or seventeen.

What “year” is she talking about? They learned there would be no trial barely four months after the events. See what they do? Saying “I grew a lot older in four months” could make even the most gullible person have some doubts. So the authors have to lie big, hoping nobody would call their bluff - because it’s all bullshit, of course, starting with the “assault” part and ending with the attempt itself to make people believe the photos they can see of her as a ripe young lady were made later: you can see in Zenovich films that they come from that very March ’77. Unfortunately, in another part of the book she mentions that in summer of that year (that is, before she “had grown and looked a lot older”) “I cut my hair short and gained some weight”. In the photos Zenovich produces she has the same haircut and the same proportions as in Polanski’s photo – and doesn’t look a day older or younger. Too many cooks indeed.

No, dear friends. She did look, as everyone said and we can plainly see in the pictures, at least 18. And that is why there never was any “child molesting” count, hard as the media try to make you believe there was.

And now the interesting part.

In the first chapters of the book, she keeps emphasizing the fact that she had a pet bird. As if, you know, it’s something only a little (pre-pubescent) girl can have. (I personally never knew keeping pets was incompatible with maturity. I hear voices: She had a pet BIRD, and he says the sex was consensual!!)
She also mentions she used to have a rat, and here’s where we have new discrepancies:

That January of 1976 (…) as I stuffed my pet rat, Odin, into my carry-on. (I was quite a good smuggler at thirteen.)   

Hmm. If she was born, as she insists, on March 31, 1963, there’s no way she could be 13 in January of 76. You may remember that ancestry.co.uk gives her birthday as Sept 1, 1962. You may also remember that in school year 77/78 she was a student of the 9th grade. And that she only provided a copy of her birth certificate to the Grand Jury – without a word in the memoir either about this fact, or about what happened to the original.

This rat story solidifies my conviction that in March ‘77 she was at least 14 and a half. That would explain her maturity (precocious even in that case) and her extreme interest in sex, which she so vividly describes in the chapters we’ll look into later.

But the rat story doesn’t stop here! By the time of the “events” the rat is replaced by a bird. Samantha comes out of her room to meet Polanski, she writes, carrying the bird on her head.

In “Roman Polanski: Odd Man Out” by Marina Zenovich, mother Gailey tells this story with all the drama effects, and of course, she, too, emphasizes this “proof” of her daughter’s pre-pubescence. Only in her version, it’s a rat, not a bird. And here are the pictures she shows:









And… what now? No, it is not a picture taken on that very day (no pictures were taken, and it clearly is not a bird). It’s a picture taken before. How long before? Well, we know Samantha had the rat a year and a half before that day, and she didn’t say it was newborn at that time. Pet rats age quickly. So, the young lady in the photo above is Geimer at least a few months before the events; maybe as long before as a year; maybe a year and a half.

“Looked younger than thirteen”? “Prepubescent”? Really, guys, these people take you for complete fools!

Another facet of this “little child” thing is alleged innocence. We know that Geimer was not a virgin (by her confession in an interview, she had been sexually active “for a long time”). For people who would still insist that it only means she had been raped in those cases, too (though I have never seen any holy wrath directed towards those others who had “raped” her), here’s a quote from the book:

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. There is something so earnest and yet sexy about getting a cross as a present.

Just in case you missed something: the April 1 is the April 1 of that same ’77, only three weeks after the “child rape”. Somehow she stopped being pre-pubescent in these three weeks (just like she miraculously wasn’t months before, with her boyfriend and others, mentioned by Dalton); you can learn from the book that her sex life at the time was abundant and multifarious.

So, barefaced lies, big lies, misleading… all to justify the word “rape”? No, not only that. Also to give her behavior on that day a very special interpretation. To make it appear something different than it was. To make you believe that she, in her innocence, was too confused to behave otherwise. And that by no means! by no means! was it a set-up orchestrated by mother.

Very well then, let’s proceed.





Chapter 4. A Dozen Impossible Things Before Breakfast


To explain her behavior, which the probation report describes as perfect willingness, with a total absence of forcing or coercing from the part of the defendant – and to explain the behavior of her mother, that looks exactly like what we deduced here (a premeditated setup, theory corroborated by the development of the events), the three authors of the book have to undertake lots of clumsy manipulations. We’ll presently see, again, a whole assortment of lies.

Mom didn’t really have a long attention span when it came to men. She first married a local boy at seventeen when she was four months pregnant with my sister, Kim

Barefaced lies. Anyone who can count can easily calculate. During the GJ interrogation, Susan Gailey (mother) is asked how old her elder daughter is, and she says 20. Susan was born in 1941. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find the exact dates of birth of either Susan or Kim (the elder daughter), but there’s no way she could be 17 when four months into pregnancy. To be 20 in March ’77, Kim has to have been born either in 1957 (25% probability) or in 1956 (75%), when Susan was, depending on her birth month, either 15 or 14. If you look at the calendar, you can see that there is probability that Susan got pregnant when she was 13. There is no indication in the book that she got pregnant from her first sexual experience, or that it was a result of rape.

Why these lies, so easy to disprove? Of course, it’s all well calculated. The first line in the quoted passage seems so honest, so frank, like the author is saying the Whole Truth even at her own expense, - so personal and so straightforward!  - that who on earth will count months and years?

And it’s not just an innocent lie. It’s the cornerstone of the precarious construction that follows.

Geimer (it feels like these pages were written by her rather than Newman or Silver) gives a description of what their life in Hollywood was like, with mother three times divorced by the age of thirty-two and now living with a boyfriend (Bob) working for Marijuana Weekly, with whom she was smoking pot “every night in their room”:

…It was like being on a permanent pot-infused vacation.
…I don’t think I can overstate the shift in attitudes toward sex in the mid- to late 1970s versus ten or even five years before. The Joy of Sex, published in 1972, held a place of honor in my mother’s bedroom. (…)Young girls are eroticized to some extent in every culture, and at this point in time in our own culture that eroticization had become almost mainstream.
…The bathrooms of junior high school were filled with cigarette smoke. When we visited the homes of our friends, their parents would offer us a beer. Cocaine was just beginning to become popular, but really, that wasn’t yet the drug for the kicked-back Los Angeles vibe.

I can’t help seeing Silver kicking in at this moment. Notice the (…) in the quote above? The part I omitted is, “She never knew I read it, but naturally I did, cover to cover.” It is crucial that we be convinced: mother didn’t know. Mother had no idea of anything going on, even though she herself was pregnant at… mmm… let it be… "seventeen" (not 14 or, God forbid, 13! No, no!!).

Why? Because somehow we should be forced to close our eyes on what we’ve read in this very book, or known from other documents, and swallow this:

The story that would be repeated in the press for years was that my mother had, for lack of a better term, pimped me out – that she had set me up with Roman as a kind of bait, not only for my career but for hers.
In fact, as improbable as it now sounds, it never, ever crossed her mind that he would have sex with me. First, even though there were movies like Taxi Driver and Manhattan, which featured a twelve-year-old prostitute and a forty-year-old man’s relationship with a high school student, no one talked about real-life child sex abuse. (…) And however “adult” I may have acted… I looked like a child.
Then there was Roman’s fame. It protected him, but not just in the way people would assume. We wanted something from him – that would be people’s first thought. We did want something from him, too. But the idea that my mother looked the other way because of his fame – that’s what was false. See, because of his fame, she never for a second thought she would have to look the other way.

How much she “looked like a child we already know. This lie alone relieves us of all responsibility to refute the others, because everything is built on it. But since we’ve already started this quest, let’s proceed.

Definition: Contextual lie. One can state part of the truth out of context, knowing that without complete information, it gives a false impression. Likewise, one can actually state accurate facts, yet deceive with them.

Can you find it in the quote above? Of course, it’s the first passage. Saying “the story that would be repeated in the press for years” (which, by the way, is itself an example of a big lie, since the press repeats a totally different story) she somehow tries to make it sound dubious by definition: because it is a “story”, because it is “repeated”, and because she herself quotes it. This contextual lie is meant to be propped by the above barefaced lie, all to lead us to believe that mother could never ever have had such an extravagant idea.

See now why she lied about the age of her mother when pregnant? They want us to unsee the picture formed by Samantha’s own words, by her maturity and experience, by the fact that her grandmother got pregnant with Susan when she too was way below the modern age of consent in the USA (she doesn’t say it, but plain calculations show it clearly), and the context of the ‘70s Samantha describes so vividly, mother’s three divorces and a Hollywood boyfriend, the “pot-infused” lifestyle… And even this is not all yet.

Before I ever became sexually active my mother had taken me aside and given me some sort of spermicidal cream, which I used the one time I had sex with Steve in California.

It was when Samantha was either twelve, or barely thirteen, because by March ’77 she had already broken up with her first lover. So… mother had no idea her daughter could have sex? Really? Oh, I forgot, “no one talked about real-life child sex abuse”. Thus, having sex with someone next door is ok, but having it with someone you “want something from” – and eventually get a lot from, in terms of both money and fame - is suddenly “abuse”? Excuse me, who abuses whom in this case?  And, lo, forgot again: Polanski’s fame “protected” him. The famous womanizer whose best known lover at that very time was 15 (according to other sources, 16, although for some reason Geimer once says “14”, apparently out of habit for lying) and didn’t look a day older than Samantha – was “protected” by his fame in the eyes of a Hollywood actress with such a past, an aspiring actress’s mother? Tell it to the marines.

In fact, as improbable as it now sounds, it never, ever crossed her mind that he would have sex with me.

Recognize the trick? “as improbable as it now sounds” means to make you feel ashamed for ever thinking it “improbable”. Resist manipulations, guys. No use arguing “we don’t really know what did or didn’t cross Susan Gailey’s mind”: it would have been an open question only if Geimer and her two co-workers didn’t need to prop it with lies. Since they do, the whole picture they’re trying to paint is ruined.

But they don’t stop there. They forget that le meilleur est l’ennemi du bien, and, believing for some reason that everyone is gullible to the point of idiocy, say this:

My mother said [to the Grand Jury], “I thought he might want younger girls.”
Younger! This moment showed how her mind was really working. Somehow she had gotten the impression that he was photographing children. And she didn’t think for a second that he was a pedophile. Apparently he had been dating Nastassja Kinski, who was fifteen at the time, but my mother had no idea. His taste for young girls, news to us, would soon be widely publicized. But Kinski, however young, looked like a woman and I did not – and my mother simply did not put me into that category of nubile beauty who would have caught his attention. So it was the idea that I was too old for the shoot, not quite a child anymore, that was worrying her. That Polanski had a sexual interest in her daughter never occurred to her. Truthfully, until that night it had never occurred to me, either.

Now please remember the photos (and the verbal descriptions) and decide for yourself if a mother (whose own sex life started at no later than 14 and who had given her daughter spermicidal cream months before), could really believe that someone who intended to photograph children would pick that ripe young woman.

So much is inside that paragraph… Barefaced lie: “Kinski… looked like a woman and I did not”. False pretence: “but my mother had no idea” – living in Hollywood, and her daughter Kim dating an acquaintance of Polanski’s. And don’t forget they had seen the pictures he had taken of others, when he explained to them what exactly he wanted.


Kinski

there were these extraordinary images of an international beauty…
…he showed these photos of jaw-dropping beauties in Vogue – girls on beaches, in fields, dressed in backless evening gowns

So, mother thought he intended to photograph children?

Definition: Economy with the truth is popularly used as a euphemism for deceit, whether by volunteering false information (i.e., lying) or by deliberately holding back relevant facts. More literally, it describes a careful use of facts so as not to reveal too much information, as in "speaking carefully".

The relevant fact that is deliberately held back in the book is that the magazine was Vogue Hommes. You’ll see Vogue mentioned a lot of times in the book, and not a single time will it be made known to you that it was Vogue Hommes. There are two main reasons to this: first, if it were mentioned, the mother’s suggestion that she wanted her daughter to pose as a “child” (she claims she was afraid Samantha looked too old, remember?) for a men’s magazine would seem dubious to say the least. Next, it would prevent her from further playing total innocence.

This play is elaborate and extremely interesting to analyze. Too bad it doesn’t hold water when confronted with elementary facts.

The Vogue lies will resurface, and be developed, in the crucial moment: the ballet around the topless photos.

The Gaileys’ description of this episode abounds in dramatic details (more abundant and more dramatic from year to year), whose main problem is that they can’t be glued together.

So, after the fatal encounter at Nicholson’s (we talked about it here, and will talk further, with the help of the new material, in the next chapter) Polanski, blissfully unaware that he’s just “raped a child”, brings Samantha home.

I flew into the house and into my room, but not before my mother got a good look at me. My eyes were glazed and the pupils huge; my hair was damp.

We’ll presently see that there could be no glazed eyes or huge pupils, but for the time being let’s accept this part. She runs into the house and only has time to whisper to mother that she told “him” she had asthma. Let it be so, too.

Polanski shows Susan, Kim and Bob the photos of the previous session, and, according to the Gaileys, all hell breaks loose, ending with

My mother felt the blood rising into her neck, choking her, her lips stretched thin.
“Get him out of here,” Mom rasped.

Polanski himself didn’t notice anything of the kind, other than that the attitude “wasn’t as friendly as it had been”: according to him, they liked the photos, and even smoked a joint together before he left. I am inclined to believe him because, unlike Samantha’s stories, all his accounts are always precise, consistent, never contradicting any known facts or documents, and altogether plausible; but even if we disregard my personal impression, the question arises: wouldn’t a man who is suddenly thrown out have stopped to ask what happened? Let’s give Mom the benefit of the doubt: maybe she “rasped” it inaudibly, like she does in the big show she puts on for Zenovich in Odd Man Out.

But the question remains: what was the cause of everybody’s indignation? It is described like a Greek tragedy, with everyone pulling their hair out and uttering incoherent condemnations.

The reason was one topless photo.

And before everyone turns their indignation on me, let me remind you that Mom Gailey had been informed of the Jacuzzi shots.

Now, how does that fit together? She was called from Nicholson’s residence, and Polanski told her they were going to make shots in the Jacuzzi. She didn’t ask any questions – just like previously she (presumably! It’s all according to their words only – and we know by now what their words are worth) had never ever asked her daughter about the character of the photos they had taken on the hill.

How are Geimer/Newman/Silver going to find a way out of this predicament?

Easy.

They do not mention that Polanski told Susan about Jacuzzi. They just don’t. Economy with the truth, as you may have noticed - and at its worst.

He gets on the phone with my mother and tells her we’re at Jack Nicholson’s house up in Mulholland Canyon, not very far. It’s already dark, but he’ll bring me home soon. Having reassured her, they hang up.

And this omission alone could be enough for us to know that they are lying, and that they know why they have to lie.

But Silver is a lawyer, right? He knows that withholding crucial information may be frowned upon: Susan testified to the Grand Jury that Polanski had consulted her about the Jacuzzi shots. Thus, much later, and very inconspicuously, the authors do mention this, but in the context where all dramatic emphasis is placed elsewhere and no connection can be made with the other drama piece.

Or so they think. Because this book, with all its discrepancies and blatant lies is meant to be read by fools – fools they take you for.

And, having omitted one crucial fact, they hurry to seal this by re-omitting another:

At that point they knew nothing other than that he had taken topless pictures of me – but that, in itself, was enough of a reason for a freak-out. It wasn’t just the toplessness alone, though there was that. It was the deception. The betrayal of trust. In their minds Vogue meant two things: fashion and clothes. Lots and lots of clothes. The sheer badness of the photos made them realize something was wrong.

Remember that they had seen the pictures in Vogue Hommes, had known that it was Vogue Hommes – not just Vogue as the authors are trying to make us believe. And Susan had known that Samantha was posing naked in a bath – and had had at least a couple of hours to think about it.

All the while, and some time after this, Samantha is presumably alone in her room, with the only interruption from her mother when she (presumably) came in to inquire about the topless pictures.

Wait, what? Your daughter calls you from someone’s home and you learn from the man she’s with that she is going to pose naked in a bath. She comes back “eyes glazed, pupils huge”, whispers something incoherent and runs in; then you see her topless photos… and you sit around, talking about dogs (see Susan’s and Kim's testimonies – Samantha herself is deplorably brief about this part in her book) with the man she was with? Not in the least interested to find out whether anything happened? And you never ask her about anything till her boyfriend comes and her sister (presumably) overhears their conversation?

There’s no way to fit all of it together: the Vogue, the Jacuzzi, the huge pupils, the overreaction about the photos and the lack of interest towards the “glazed-eyed” daughter. No way except one: it just didn’t happen the way they are saying it did.

The only plausible picture is – but of course my readers can build it themselves? All the lies used by the authors have only one explanation: a wish to lie oneself out of the accusation of setup.






Chapter 3. Victim Blaming and Rape Apology


Before we proceed, we must make one thing quite clear.

The “victim blaming” fallacy is used all the time, and it’s priceless in its very shamelessness.

Every time we prove, with the documents and the “victim’s” own statements, that there was no rape, we are called rape apologists.

Every time we prove, with the documents and the “victim’s” own statements, that she was a false accuser, every time we catch her lying; every time we quote the documented truth, every time we expose the contradictions and inconsistencies in her statements,  this is called blaming the victim.

Let’s abstract from rape for a moment: it holds morbid fascination for too many people and totally precludes them from thinking straight. Let’s have another example.

If someone gets assaulted and robbed of his money on his way home at night, it’s a crime. If we say, “you shouldn’t have been going home so late” or “you shouldn’t have been carrying this amount of money when alone and drunk”, this is blaming the victim. However true all our “shouldn’t have” may be, they do not change the situation: the crime was committed. No number of quite rightful “should(n’t) have”s will change the bare obvious fact: it was assault and robbery, and the man who committed it was an assaulter and a robber.

If, however, we prove that the man in question was not robbed, but lost his money, wasted it or gave it away – it is not blaming the victim. It is proving that he was not a victim of assault or robbery.

If, moreover, we see that the man is accusing someone of assault and robbery while we can prove that he lost his money, wasted it or gave it away (to that very man he is trying to accuse now) – our proving this is not blaming the victim, either. It is exposing the man as a false accuser. No amount of demagogy can turn a false accuser into a “victim”.

Clear now? If you can’t apply my example to rape cases, I’ll chew it for you. Blaming is saying: “you are guilty of your own rape”. It’s an unfair and a disgusting thing to say, because, no matter how provocative someone’s behavior is, nobody has the right to rape, it’s a hideous crime against a human being. But it only applies when rape took place. When there has been no rape, there’s no rape victim and no rapist. Showing the truth of the case and proving it with facts is not rape apology: it’s proving no rape took place, thus the false accuser can’t by any twist of logic be considered a “victim”. The only victim in a false rape accusation is the falsely accused.

Telling the truth about the false accuser is not “blaming the victim”. Truth can’t be “blaming” at all: only those who are afraid of truth constantly reinvent this myth. If the accuser had clear consciousness about the case, she wouldn’t be afraid of the truth. And she wouldn’t have to lie.

But Geimer is afraid of the truth! Just ask yourself: why? Why would she hold back this and distort that? What is her purpose in endeavoring to hide the crucial facts or to mislead you with direct lies? We have already seen and we will shortly see that she lies continuously, about things major or minor – but there are no minor lies in this case. They all serve the same purpose: to lead you astray, away from the simple fact that she and her mother are false rape accusers guilty of a setup.

Look, for example, at this piece of demagogy she provides:

There is a certain kind of religious mind-set that believes girls who get raped deserve it. If you were morally sound, God would protect you from rape. And therefore, you must be as guilty to have been a rape victim as the rapist was to rape you.
(…)
As a society we’re constantly giving young girls tips on how to stay safe: don’t go out late at night, dress modestly, don’t go out alone, don’t drink, and don’t have premarital sex. While I certainly understand why we tell women these things, and even think we can make certain commonsense choices that keep us from having sexual experiences we’ll regret, we can’t send the message that when something as grotesque as a rape happens, you deserved it.

The general statements she makes here are themselves 100% correct: no, it’s not right to blame the victim. No, there’s no justification of rape. No, a rape victim is not guilty. But saying all this, and gaining your agreement with this obvious position, she at the same time ensures that you apply this to her own case. But it is not in any way applicable because there was no rape.

I spy a lawyer’s touch there. It must have been Silver who ingeniously thought of the trick of saying all the right things and then pretending they are applicable, only to jerk the rug from under the opponents’ feet.

Luckily, not all his opponents are as brainless as Silver and Cie had hoped.

And they really had hoped you, my reader, are brainless. Look what they do:

This is not to say the tactic of blaming the victim in a rape case was anything new. Quite the contrary: Even with forensic evidence of sexual activity, the defense tries to manipulate the issue to a he said/she said case, and often attacks the credibility and morality of the victim. Fortunately, two years earlier, California state senator Alan Robbins introduced and passed the Robbins Rape Evidence Law, which prohibited rape defendants from introducing as evidence at trial the sexual histories of their victims.

I hope you remember that the only “forensic evidence” was a sterile man’s semen on her panties? That medical examination failed to find any, even the smallest, trace of any intercourse? It’s all in the documents; Silver/Newman/Geimer go beyond plain old lying now – they are just hypnotizing you into forgetting everything that you know, everything that is documented. No, with the absence of any evidence except forged, this case was a he said/she said case, and in these cases the credibility of the accuser becomes crucial.

When faced with all the documents, the only argument my opponents have ever come up with was, “She couldn’t possibly have given consent, she was only thirteen!” That is where her past sex history becomes important. Not to show that she was “immoral”, not to “blame” her -  but to make everyone understand that yes, she could have given consent, and her consent was quite informed, because she had given it before (she would also give it a countless number of times with numerous partners before she turned fifteen, let alone 18 - without anyone considering it rape; kiss goodbye to another fallacy, namely “it was rape because she was a minor”).

Every time we prove a point, they start shouting “blaming the victim!” I’ll repeat it as many times as it takes people to finally understand: exposing a false accuser is not blaming the victim. There’s no rape victim where there’s no rape. And no truth can harm an innocent.





Chapter 5. Liar, Liar, Panties on Fire!


Yes, panties. We'll have to talk about them.

We alreadyknow from the Grand Jury transcripts that Lee Edward Mann, a criminalist assigned to the Scientific Investigation Division of the LAPD, and Dr.Larson both testified that the stain of semen left on the panties the family had given to the police belonged to a sterile man. Their testimonies are quite unambiguous. The man who left his stain on her panties was unable to have children, a condition that could be, for example, a result of vasectomy.

I repeat once again, in even plainer words: the experts testified that the stain was left by someone who was not Polanski.

What course of events could have lead to a third party’s semen appearing on Samantha’s panties? There a only a few versions, and they are all very unfortunate for her. First, she could have had sex with someone else on that very day. Next, her family could have forged this evidence. Whichever you choose, it’s damning evidence against her; and in either case, the family committed a crime trying to mislead the justice (whatever little justice there was).

But the Silver/Newman/Geimer team go even further than this. They (well, mainly Silver, I believe) are trying to make it sound as if there the conclusion of the experts was not definite. They never quote the experts, but write this instead:

Then came the criminologist who testified about my panties. To people who are into forensics, this was interesting. He testified that semen was found in the underwear, but not sperm. How? Unclear. Low sperm count, or possibly vasectomy. (But then again, why did Polanski ask me when I’d last had my period if he couldn’t get me pregnant? Of course, the test wasn’t conclusive.)

Note the “unclear” and “of course, the test wasn’t conclusive”, also the bold-faced attempt to involve Polanski (who, as you probably know, never experienced any sperm count problems) again.

There were also swabs from other parts of my body – vagina, anus – again with the appearance of semen, but no sperm. It was an unfortunate finding for the prosecution; the testing method for semen was known not to be as accurate as the testing method for sperm. First, there was a chance that the chemical used to detect semen was instead detecting enzymes in vaginal fluid; it was all a question of how quickly the chemical [94] applied to the stain changed color. (In this case, it changed color very quickly, indicating semen.) And second, sperm would have helped identify the perpetrator more readily, although not with the almost 100 percent accuracy of today. But at any rate, one could argue (and clearly the defense intended to) that the semen came from someone else.

The only thing the reader can get from all this is a vague feeling that due to the imperfection of the expertise, there was no telling whether or not the semen belonged to Polanski, and thus the mean defense was going to play on it. The authors also try to make it seem corroborated by declaring that the same peculiar “semen, but no sperm” was found on the swabs, which is just our old acquaintance, barefaced lie: the examination report goes, “Vaginal and anal slides were taken which, according to the Los Angeles police department criminalist were negative, were tested negative for semen.

Of course they have to make it sound incomprehensible. It’s too big a thing. Clear and plain experts’ testimonies had to be removed as far as possible from the public’s eye.

They don’t stop even here, though. Fearing that someone might draw the right conclusions or, God forbid, read the actual transcript, they deal this preventive blow:

The medical examiner had found only semen and no sperm – meaning that a jury would hear the possibility that I, who admitted to having sexual experience, might have had that underwear stained with someone else’s semen.

Recognize the pattern? They do it all the time. If they say something sarcastically enough - note the use of the italics – the reader must at once shudder at the enormity of the accusation. Someone else’s semen indeed, what a thought! But… it was someone else’s, and there’s no way around it, hard as Silver tries to find it.

Another such attempt is implying that Dalton agreed to the plea bargain because further testing showed that it was Polanski’s semen after all. They never say it in as many words, because sometimes Silver, as we’ve seen, remembers that he is a lawyer. Then he endeavors to veil the most preposterous lies, and concoct this:

There is still a certain amount of mystery attached to the results of these tests. After two weeks, Dalton must have had them, but he never said anything to Larry [Lawrence Silver  - J.M.]. The test results of the prosecution’s sample were positive for semen but negative for sperm. The semen could have possibly belonged to someone else. Sperm may have provided a clearer link to Polanski. Still, after presumably getting the results of his sample back, Dalton wanted to discuss a plea bargain. Is it possible that somehow sperm had been found in that portion of the sample? Perhaps the defense’s test results made this less of a he said/she said situation after all.

All of this would be very clever – see, they are so honest, they even say that the prosecution’s sample was negative for sperm (omitting to add, however, that it means only one thing, without any maybes) – but at the same time manage to insinuate that the defense’s sample could have shown something different. Because, mind you, Dalton didn’t say anything to Silver. As to why the defense agreed to plea bargain, we analyzed it enough here. Silver and the Gaileys did everything they could to avoid trial, and Polanski was too noble not to understand that a “stigma” (as Silver put it in his letter to the judge) attached to the girl would really be too hard. What with a sterile man’s sperm, a total absence of all other evidence, and the Gaileys’ preposterous statements, she would have been publicly exposed as a perjurer and a false accuser, and that’s not the right way to start a life.

So, if we want to be able to see the truth behind Geimer/Silver/Newman cobwebs, we must always remember that they lie at every step – and the panties can be a graphic symbol thereof.

The course of the events that lead to the panties getting handed over to the police has been analyzed by us thoroughly, but let’s now look at some of their aspects as presented in the book.

Since no evidence was present (except someone else’s sperm, don’t forget this), it’s only her bare words that we have to deal with, thus everything hinges on her credibility. Geimer keeps complaining that the defense was going to “attack” her credibility. What credibility? We’ve already seen enough lies to reduce anyone’s credibility to zero, and we’re only starting.

To explain her behavior on that day she uses three main lies. The first is her being a “kid”, which we’ve already dealt with (see also this chapter). The next is her mother’s blissful ignorance, which we’ve been through with, too. At last, she keeps trying to convince us that he actually “drugged” her and “plied” her with champagne.

…I drink. He refills my glass. I drink more. He keeps refilling, but I try to pace myself.
…Next we go into the kitchen. He refills my glass.
…He shoots some more photos, and by the time we’re done in the kitchen, I’ve downed another glass of champagne. He pours again. My glass never gets empty. He’s a good host, too, I guess.

Now let’s calculate. The bottle of champagne was 0.75 liter. According to the police description, half was left; it makes it 0.375. Two people – Polanski and Kalliniotes, who poured the wine – drank a glass each. An average champagne glass holds 100 to 125 ml; ok, we’ll be biased in Geimer’s favor (we always are when we don’t know exact figures or facts) and make it 100. Then, all Samantha could consume – including what she drank in the presence of Kalliniotes - was no more than 0.175 l. Now go back to the quotes and count the number of “refilled” glasses she says she drank.

We remember, of course, from the Grand Jury transcript, that nobody forced Samantha to drink any of this at all. Of all the beverages that were in the fridge, she chose champagne (“I’d been offered beer or wine at my parents’ friends’ houses before”); Elena Kalliniotes poured it to her. At no time in the testimony does Samantha say that Polanski actually asked or prompted her to drink. Now we suddenly learn that his directions went like this:

“Should I drink the champagne or just pretend?”
“Yes, drink it. Hold the glass to your lips. Now lower it. Sip. Look at me. Look over there. Sip a little.”

and that he “kept refilling” it from a magic bottle where half the content always remains no matter how many people have drunk. Now it’s not out of place to remember what Geimer says in the end of the book:

[Lawrence Silver] has been there every step of the way. I’ve depended on his memory to tell my story, which in many ways is his story too.

which Silver himself confirms:

I have provided Samantha with information about the legal events, and helped jog her memory.

That accounts for it, of course. New details appear, and the old miraculously disappear – for example, how she confessed to the Jury that she had also drank champagne from Polanski’s glass (we’ll discuss the implications of this in the next chapter). Likewise, new details about her taking that part of the Quaalude pill read like another contribution from the indefatigable Silver:

“Do you want part of one?” he asks. First I say no. Then 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?
Then he asks again. And then… Oh, I don’t know. He wants me to. How can I say no?
So then I say yes.

In the testimony, this story is much simpler, remember? He asked if she wanted some, and she said ok. Never did she mention that he asked her “again” or that he “wanted” her to. I am not even mentioning the obvious – that she testified to have taken the Quaaludes before, and her denying it now is exceedingly clumsy.

But we must be grateful for small favors. At least she didn’t write something like what she said in her Hattie Kauffman 2003 interview. Remember? That he deceived her into taking the pills, pretending they were asthma medicine?

I wonder what she would say now if confronted with that interview? Could she still maintain that she has any “credibility”? Even if she hadn’t concocted such a lot of other obvious lies, that alone could have been enough to never ever believe any word she says… but she never stops. She repeats the old ones, or discards the old ones and creates new ones while discarding the recorded, documented truths…

Aren’t we already sick of her lying? Must I explain once again why the old “double sodomy” tale is entirely a product of the family’s joint imagination, or will it suffice if I just say that Geimer’s description of her feelings about it, amounting to nothing more than a mild surprise, perfectly corroborate our argumentation here? I sincerely hope so, because I would like to remove Geimer’s A-hole as far from these pages as possible; it features prominently enough in every article written about her.

Let’s for a change take all her words for granted and look at the “events” as she describes them.