Polanski rape victim says drop charges

Samantha Geimer, the woman at the centre of the infamous rape case against Roman Polanski (pictured), has asked for the charges against him to be dropped because she says she cannot stand the trauma of having the incident raked over again by the media. As reported here, the Polish-born, Oscar-winning film director of Chinatown and The Pianist is attempting to have the 32-year-old conviction, which resulted in him fleeing the US in 1977 on the eve of being sentenced, struck off on the basis of new evidence.

Because of this, 45-year-old Geimer has filed a legal declaration asking that the charge be dismissed. In her petition, she criticised the Los Angeles County district attorney's office saying that she was being victimised again by prosecutors' focus on lurid details of what happened to her when she was 13.

Now a wife and mother of three children, Geimer said the insistence by prosecutors and the court that Polanski, who now lives as a fugitive in France, must appear in person to seek dismissal "is a joke, a cruel joke being played on me".

The new evidence that could see Polanski acquitted came to light in the documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, which revealed that the case against him at the time was flawed due to "a pattern of misconduct and improper communications" between the district attorney's office and the late superior court judge, Laurence Rittenband.

While the Los Angeles DA's office do not dispute this, it has made things difficult for Polanski – and as a result Geimer – by insisting that he must come to the US and appear in court in person, an act which could theoretically see him arrested and sent to jail, before the charges can be dropped.

Geimer, like Polanski's lawyers, says prosecutors are reciting sexually explicit details of the case to distract from their office's wrongdoing during the trial. In a motion filed on January 6, Deputy District Attorney David Walgren provided sexually explicit descriptions of the assault, which took place during a photo shoot with Polanski. It included graphic details of the director's sexual activity with the girl that had never before been described in legal documents