![Samantha Geimer.](http://web.archive.org./web/20131002234901im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2013/10/01/4793528/art-771676354-620x349.jpg)
Surprising forgiving: Samantha Geimer is in Australia to promote her book, The Girl. Photo: Dean Sewell
Thirty-six years after being swept up in one of Hollywood's most infamous scandals, when Roman Polanski sexually assaulted her at Jack Nicholson's house when she was just 13, Samantha Geimer has heard all the slurs.
"When it first happened, I was a liar and slut and a prostitute," she says. "Or I wanted it. Or I was a drug-using promiscuous young girl.
"Or my mum sold me to him or set it up. Or it was all to somehow benefit her career. When it first happened, there was nothing that wasn't said about me and my mum."
![Arresting subject: Roman Polanski's controversial past is revisited.](http://web.archive.org./web/20131002234901im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2013/09/21/4767610/ts-sun-article-20130921182146631157-620x349.jpg)
Then ... Roman Polanski's controversial past gets revisited.
But Geimer, now a surprisingly forgiving 50-year-old, recognises that attitudes have changed as paedophilia has become a scourge in churches, schools, scout halls and showbiz dressing rooms.
"Times have changed," she said. "Now Roman gets the treatment I was getting at the beginning."
If the reference to "Roman" rather than "Polanski" seems personal, it reflects the the way two have been linked since that day in 1977, when the celebrated director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown turned a photographic shoot into something else after giving her champagne and part of a quaalude then asking her to get into a spa and take off her clothes.
![Samantha Greimer as a girl.](http://web.archive.org./web/20131002234901im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2013/10/01/4792877/geimer-353-300x0.jpg)
Then ... Samantha Greimer as a girl.
"All day I thought everything was fine," Geimer says. "But then at the very end of the evening when he decided to get into the jacuzzi I immediately realised something was wrong - this wasn't part of the photo shoot.
"I was frightened. I didn't quite know what to do."
After her troubled mother called the police later that night, upset firstly at seeing the topless photos then learning Polanski had sexually assaulted her daughter, Geimer found the media attention and the extended and bungled court proceedings traumatic, changing her life forever.
![Roman Polanski](http://web.archive.org./web/20131002234901im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2013/09/19/4760255/NG_Alnarrow_polanski_20130919121638442770-300x0.jpg)
Now ... Hollywood director Roman Polanski.
"To say that the Roman Polanski rape case was a circus is only the mildest exaggeration," she writes in The Girl: A Life Lived in the Shadow of Roman Polanski. "For the media, there was nothing to equal its heady combination of sex, celebrity and depravity until the O.J. Simpson trial in 1995.
"Just about everybody who lived through or read about this sordid chapter in Hollywood history had an opinion about the renowned director and the girl he was accused of drugging, raping and sodomising - me."
Initially charged with six felony counts, Polanski accepted a plea deal and pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor. He served 42 days at a secure unit undergoing psychiatric evaluation then fled the US for France before he was sentenced.
![Samantha Geimer](http://web.archive.org./web/20131002234901im_/http://images.theage.com.au/2013/09/19/4760256/NG_Alnarrow1_polanski-20130919121718524408-300x0.jpg)
Now ... Author Samantha Geimer.
When Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in 2009, bringing yet more lurid headlines and protests, Geimer decided to write the book to "take back ownership of my own story".
In Australia to launch the book, Geimer, who lives in Las Vegas and has three adult sons, admits she was upset for a long time that her mother had drawn attention to the incident.
"I was very angry that she called the police and I was now being called a liar and put through all these terrible thing," she says. "The phone was ringing, we couldn't leave the house, everybody was saying awful stuff.
"Mostly it was that I didn't even want to tell anybody then, when I'm forced to tell someone, everyone says I'm lying. I was angry at her at least for that next year.
"Here she is feeling terribly guilty and trying to keep us anonymous and facing all that same pressure and I'm just being like an awful, mean little brat."
In The Girl, Geimer describes Polanski as "an old goat" who was "selfish and arrogant" but she baulks at calling him a paedophile, despite what seems like a calculated grooming in her case and his sexual relationships with other young women including actresses Nastassja Kinski and Charlotte Lewis.
"I don't use words like predator or paedophile," she says. "It was a one-time mistake. He did a bad thing. He pled guilty, he paid the price.
"I don't think you should judge somebody off one single event and label them for the rest of their life. I would never do that because as far as I know, this was the only event that's ever happened."
Geimer insists she is not a victim – "bad things happen to everybody" – but is still angry about the way the court case was manipulated a publicity seeking judge and others for their own purposes.
"The media is the media – those people are doing their jobs," she says. "What happened with Roman, that was over so quick. So much more awful stuff happened so fast that that was easy to let go of. But I do still have some strong feelings about the court."
Geimer believes the "lack of justice and the corruption in the California court" has failed her, her family and Polanski. Given their connection over so many decades, how will she feel when the Oscar-winning director, now 80, dies?
"I feel like my phone will ring and it's going to be really unfortunate and sad," she says. "I'm not going to want to take that call. But if something were to happen to me today, I'm sure no one will call Roman."
The Girl – A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski (Simon & Schuster, $29.99) is out now.