Audio has resurfaced of Oscar-winning director Quentin Tarantino defending fugitive-child rapist Roman Polanski with the excuse that the 13-year-old victim “wanted to have it,” meaning sex.
Here’s a portion of the interview via the Daily Mail.
During a 2003 interview with Howard Stern, not long after Hollywood awarded Polanski a Best Director Oscar and standing ovation for The Pianist, the shock jock asked Tarantino how Hollywood can embrace “this madman, this director who raped a 13-year-old.”
Tarantino: He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape…he had sex with a minor. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violent, throwing them down—it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world. You can’t throw the word rape around. It’s like throwing the word ‘racist’ around. It doesn’t apply to everything people use it for. He was guilty of having sex with a minor.
Robin Quivers: That she didn’t want to have.
Tarantino: No, that was not the case AT ALL. She wanted to have it and dated the guy and—
Quivers: She was 13!
Tarantino: And by the way, we’re talking about America’s morals, not talking about the morals in Europe and everything.
Stern: Wait a minute. If you have sex with a 13-year-old girl and you’re a grown man, you know that that’s wrong.
Quivers: …giving her booze and pills…
Tarantino: Look, she was down with this.
At this point, things got impossibly worse…
Tarantino: She [the victim] has talked about it, ‘He didn’t really do anything to me. It was technicality about me being 13.’ … You’re killing him with the pills and booze thing.
Stern: But it’s true.
Tarantino: No more than if she was 18 or 19 or 20.
To begin with, what Tarantino is saying about the victim, Samantha Geimer, recanting as an adult is simply not true.
In 1988, as a 24-year-old adult, Geimer sued Polanski in civil court for “sexual assault, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and seduction.”
In 2003, just a few months before Tarantino said these untrue things, Geimer reluctantly spoke to the media and told the story of her rape again: [emphasis added]
But soon after her meeting with Polanski, Geimer began to feel uncomfortable around the director 30 years her senior.
“Everything was going fine; then he asked me to change, well, in front of him,” she says. “It didn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to go back to the second shoot. But I didn’t at that time have the self-confidence to tell my mother and everyone, ‘No, I’m not going to go.'”
During that second shoot, Polanski’s motives became apparent.
“We did photos with me drinking champagne,” Geimer says. “Toward the end it got a little scary, and I realized he had other intentions and I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn’t quite know how to get myself out of there.”
Polanski sexually assaulted her after giving her a combination of champagne and Quaaludes.
Geimer’s mother, who lives in a guest house on her daughter’s Kauai property, found out what happened when “my sister overheard me telling my boyfriend what happened on the phone after I got home.”
The sister, who also lives on Kauai, told their mother. Polanski, who claimed the sex was consensual, was arrested the next day.
Geimer says she resisted.
“I said no several times, and then, well, gave up on that,” she says.
In a television interview several years ago, Polanski said of the incident, “It was not the right thing to do.” …
“Straight up, what he did to me was wrong,” Geimer says. “But I wish he would return to America so the whole ordeal can be put to rest for both of us. “After the publicity came out, I knew it was just as bad for him as it was for me. I’m sure if he could go back, he wouldn’t do it again. He made a terrible mistake but he’s paid for it.”
During the Stern interview, Tarantino claims Geimer changed her testimony, that once she was out from under the influence of her mother, Geimer claimed the sex with Polanski was consensual. That is simply not true. Geimer has never altered her original 1977 testimony (see below), she has only said that he was not violent or mean. But she has always maintained that she repeatedly told him “no.”
So while it was not a violent rape (if you discount the sodomy), Polanski did feed a 13-year-old girl alcohol and drugs and rape her while she plead with him not to. In a February 2003 interview with Larry King, Geimer again stood by her her story, which has remained consistent over the last 40 years.
Here is a portion of her original 1977 grand jury testimony, which resulted in six charges being filed against Polanski:
He wanted to take pictures in the Jacuzzi. No one else was in the house. She got in. He told her to take off her underwear. She did. He took a few pictures, then went into the bathroom and came back naked. He got into the deep part of the hot tub.
“He goes, ‘Come on down here.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I got to get out.’ And he goes, ‘No, come down here.’ And then I said that I had asthma and that I couldn’t. . . . And he said, ‘Just come down here a second.’ So I finally went down. . . . And he goes, ‘Doesn’t it feel better down here?’
“And he was like holding me up because it is almost over my head. And I went, ‘Yeah, but I better get out.'”
She said she wrapped a towel around her, and Polanski jumped in the pool.
“I walked over and he goes, ‘Get in here.’ ”
She resisted again. He coaxed her.
She said she swam the length of the pool, got out, went to the bathroom, put on her underwear and started drying off.
“I said I wanted to go home because I needed to take my medicine. . . . He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take you home soon.’
“I was going, ‘No, I think I better go home,’ because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch’ ” in an adjoining bedroom.
She said he started kissing her and then pulled off her panties. Gunson asked her if she felt “under the influence” at the time, and why.
“Yes. . . . I can barely remember anything that happened,” she said.
“Is there any other reason?”
“No, I was just kind of dizzy, you know, like things were kind of blurry sometimes. I was having trouble with my coordination, like walking and stuff.”
She said he started performing oral sex on her and then moved to intercourse.
“He goes, ‘Are you on the pill?’ And I went, ‘No.’ And he goes, ‘When did you last have your period?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know. . . . He goes, ‘Would you want me to go in through your back?’ And I went, ‘No.’ “
A mere 25 minutes later, the grand jury indicted Polanski on six counts: 1) furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. 2) lewd and lascivious act upon child under fourteen. 3) perversion. 4) sodomy. 5) unlawful sexual intercourse. 6) rape by use of drugs.
Later in the Stern interview, Tarantino says, “She was down to party with Roman. … I don’t believe it’s rape, not for these 13-year-old party girls.”
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