The Girl – Samantha Geimer

Odd

‘Admirably honest about her misadventures with drugs, nude pictures and a teen pregnancy’ Sunday Times

In this searing and surprising memoir, Samantha Geimer, ‘the girl’ at the center of the infamous Roman Polanski sexual assault case, breaks a virtual thirty-five-year silence to tell her story.

March 1977, Southern California. Roman Polanski drives a rented Mercedes along Mulholland Drive to Jack Nicholson’s house. Sitting next to him is an aspiring actress, Samantha Geimer, recently arrived from York, Pennsylvania. She is thirteen years old.

The undisputed facts of what happened in the following hours appear in the court record: Polanski spent hours taking pictures of Samantha – on a deck overlooking the Hollywood Hills, on a kitchen counter, topless in a Jacuzzi. Wine and Quaaludes were consumed, balance and innocence were lost, and a young girl’s life was altered forever – eternally cast as a background player in her own story.

For months on end, the Polanski case dominated the media, but even with the extensive coverage, much about that day – and the girl at the center of it all – remains a mystery.

The Girl reveals a thirteen-year-old who was simultaneously wise beyond her years yet terribly vulnerable. Telling her story in full for the first time, amantha reclaims her identity, proving that it is possible to move forward from victim to survivor and from shame to strength.

Cover photograph of Samantha Geimer taken by Roman Polanski in Los Angeles, California, 1977. Author photograph by Kathy Stanford

Cover design by S&S Art Dept

Simon & Schuster UK

ISBN 978-1-47112-887-5