Polanski’s victim asks judge to end 40-year-old sex case against director

LOS ANGELES – The woman Roman Polanski was convicted of sexually assaulting in 1977 when she was 13 appeared in court Friday and urged a judge to dismiss the 40-year-old sex case against the fugitive director.

Samantha Geimer stood before Superior Court Judge Scott Gordon in downtown Los Angeles and said she wanted the case to end.

It was the first time Geimer had appeared in court to defend Polanski. Gordon did not issue an immediate ruling.

“This is the first opportunity to come to court and talk, so I figured I’d take it since it might be my last,” Geimer, 54, said during a news conference after the court hearing.

Geimer said of Polanski, “I knew he was sorry, he was arrested the next day. I’m sure he instantly regretted what he did. It just wasn’t as traumatic to me as everyone believed it was. I was a young, sexually active teenager, and it was a scary thing but not an uncommon thing.”

In a five-minute statement read during the hearing, Geimer asked that the case be dropped, or alternatively, that Polanski be sentenced in absentia.

“Justice is not only about punishment, it’s about equity and consideration,” Geimer said in the statement.

She also asked the judge to unseal testimony of former Deputy District Attorney Roger Gunson, who formerly handled the case.

Geimer’s attorney and Polanski’s attorney, Harland Braun, attended the hearing. Polanski’s camp claims that Gunson’s testimony, which was taken in 2010, reveals that L.A. County Superior Judge Laurence Rittenband mishandled the 1977 case.

Rittenband sent Polanski to a state prison in Chino in 1977 for a 90-day diagnostic study, and the director was released after 42 days on the recommendation of the prison. Per his plea agreement with Rittenband, Romanski believed this would complete his time in custody.

However, Rittenband, facing intense media scrutiny, reneged on the promise and reportedly vowed to sentence Polanski to 50 years in prison, at which point the director fled the country.

Braun’s request that the court open Gunson’s testimony in February was denied.

The latest development in Polanski’s continuing effort to end the four-decade-old case came in April when a Los Angeles County judge refused to sentence the director in absentia on the grounds that he remains a fugitive.

In her statement, Geimer described the trauma she and her family have faced from the onslaught of publicity. For a while, she said, they were afraid to leave their house.

After the hearing, she said: “When this happened, my mother and I were (called) lying gold diggers who were attacking poor unfortunate Roman. It was a much different story, I was a drug-doing Lolita that had cornered him into this. But now he endures it. Now everyone calls him a pedophile and says terrible things about him, which aren’t true. The insults have switched, but I have empathy for the way he’s treated because I was treated the same way when this first happened.”

Asked if she considered Polanski a pedophile for the crime, Geimer said, “I was 14, not 10.”