The woman raped by filmmaker Roman Polanski decades ago said Friday that she wanted the case closed as she prepared to make her first court appearance.
“I finally will get to stand before a judge and say how I feel,” Samantha Geimer told a throng of reporters outside Los Angeles Superior Court.
“I’m going to ask for the case to be resolved in a fair manner because the justice system is more important than any one person’s crime.
“It might be my last chance,” the 54-year-old added, referring to her court appearance.
Asked what she planned to tell the judge, Geimer said: “You’ll find out when I’m done talking, if I don’t have a panic attack first.”
Geimer, who has said in the past that she has forgiven Polanski, is attending the hearing in a bid to help the filmmaker end the case against him.
“She is tired of this case going on for 40 years,” Polanski’s attorney Harlan Braun said Thursday. “She wants it over.”
The director of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Chinatown” was accused of drugging Geimer when she was 13 before raping her at the house of film star Jack Nicholson in Los Angeles in 1977.
He admitted statutory rape after a number of more serious charges were dropped, and spent 48 days in custody to undergo psychiatric evaluation before being released.
Polanski claims that he was promised by the judge overseeing the case that the seven weeks he spent in custody would be the only time he would serve.
But in 1978, convinced the judge was going to scrap his plea deal and send him to prison — possibly for decades — to avoid a public backlash, he fled to France.
The director — who is married to French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom he has two children — has since refused to return without assurances that he would not serve additional time in prison.
His attorney is seeking to unseal court documents that he says prove Polanski had an agreement with authorities but that the judge in the case planned to scrap the deal.
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