Internet rape claims hit Polanski’s Oscar hopes By Hugh Davies, Entertainment Correspondent (Filed: 13/03/2003)

Daily Telegraph

Details of rape allegations which caused Roman Polanski to flee Hollywood 26 years ago surfaced in America yesterday just 11 days before the Oscars are announced.

The director is in the running for awards for The Pianist , his acclaimed Holocaust movie, and it is believed the posting of a transcript of the grand jury testimony of his 13-year-old accuser on a website is designed to sink his chances of winning.

She describes how he plied her with drink and drugs, persuaded her to pose “bare from the waist up” for pin-up photographs, then drove her to the Beverly Hills house of the actor Jack Nicholson where he licked her naked body before having sex with her.

Curiously, the transcript, according to the Smoking Gun website, was quietly unsealed four months ago by a Los Angeles judge but it remained secret, even in late February when Samantha Geimer, now 39, mysteriously re-appeared to be interviewed by CNN’s Larry King and the Los Angeles Times.

Polanski, 69, who has lived in a luxurious apartment in Paris since he went on the run to avoid a lengthy prison sentence, had just won Baftas in London for best picture and best director, dramatically increasing his chances of an Oscar. The film also won the Palme D’Or at Canne s.

Geimer, now a mother-of-three living in Hawaii, said that she bore “no hard feelings” towards Polanski and that the case should have no bearing on Academy Award voters.

Polanski’s film is based on the memoirs of the pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish jew who survived against the odds in Nazi-occupied Warsaw.

Polanski’s parents died in Auschwitz and he, too, fought for survival as a Holocaust child.

In a conversation with John Hiscock, The Telegraph’s Los Angeles correspondent, by satellite from Paris, Polanski cut off a question about reports that he was negotiating with US prosecutors about a deal to return to America.

He snapped: “If that’s what interests you after having seen this film, it means that I somehow missed the point.”

Jeff Berg, his Hollywood agent, said that legal issues remained unresolved. The Los Angeles County district attorney said the director would be arrested if he set foot in the US as he was “a convicted felon”.

Ms Geimer reached an out-of-court settlement with Polanski – reportedly for £140,000 – after she sued him for saying in his autobiography that she was a willing participant in the sex games.

In her grand jury evidence she said that Polanski, then 43, plied her with champagne at Nicholson’s house, becoming “pretty drunk”, and took part of a Quaalude tablet.

She took off her underwear when he asked her to and got into a Jacuzzi. The director, also naked, joined her in the hot tub.

They then went to a bathroom where she dried off and told him she wanted to go home because she needed medicine for asthma. But he instructed her to go into a bedroom, where he performed oral sex and then “started to have intercourse with me”.

Asked if she said anything, she replied: “I was mostly just on and off saying ‘No, stop’ but I wasn’t fighting really because there was no one else there and I had no place to go.” Polanski then allegedly committed sodomy. Asked by a deputy district attorney why she did not more forcibly resist the director, she replied: “Because I was afraid of him.”

After his indictment on the rape charges, Polanski agreed to a plea bargain that spared him imprisonment. He admitted to unlawful sex. Five other charges, including drugging the girl and forcibly raping her, were dropped. But the deal was with the district attorney and Polanski, fearing a judge would not honour the details, escaped to France, his birthplace, while on bail. Last month, the Bafta committee wanted him to come to England where he made two of his earliest successes as a director, Repulsion and Cul De Sac in the 1960s.

He told friends that the trip was too risky as he feared the British authorities would arrest him for deportation to the United States.

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24 February 2003: Baftas steal the show

12 February 2003: Traditional story-telling woos academy voters

27 May 2002: Cannes praises Polanski but shuns British

20 April 2002: Polanski plans US return after trial deal

5 November 1997: Polanski did not rape me at 13, says ‘victim’

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