In a new documentary, famed director Roman Polanski offers an apology to Samantha Geimer, the woman he unlawfully had sex with when she was 13.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the filmmaker speaks on the case towards the end of Laurent Bouzereau’s documentary, “Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir,” which had its world premiere in Zurich, Switzerland on Tuesday.
“She is a double victim: My victim, and a victim of the press,” Polanski says in the film, which focuses more on the 78-year-old director’s view of his life than details of the case. In fact, THR reports, the documentary doesn’t really offer anything new that hasn’t already been made available on the public record.
Polanski was 43 when he had unlawful sex with Geimer, and after pleading guilty fled the country. In 2009, he was arrested in Switzerland on a U.S. arrest warrant and subsequently placed under house arrest pending extradition to the States. But in July 2010, the Swiss denied the U.S.’s request to extradite the filmmaker and Polanski was released.
Samantha Geimer said on “Larry King Live” following his release that she was “very relieved” he wasn’t extradited.
“He served his time and he did everything he was asked to do,” Geimer said. “We had a corrupt judge who was being dishonest. [Polanski] had no reason to trust the system was going to work for him, and I’ve been so much more damaged by the court system and by the media than by him.” She’d already publicly forgiven Polanski in 1997.
“If just the arrest brought such a ruckus into my life and into my backyard in a literal sense,” she said last year, “I’m sure his coming back would just be a thousand times worse.”