Bild på författaren.

Samantha Geimer

Författare till The Girl: A Life in the Shadow of Roman Polanski

2 verk 85 medlemmar 4 recensioner

Om författaren

Foto taget av: MICHAEL BRENNAN

Verk av Samantha Geimer

Taggad

Allmänna fakta

Födelsedag
1963-03-31
Kön
female
Nationalitet
USA

Medlemmar

Recensioner

A great read. Honestly written and plainly spoken. A very open account of a bad situation. It filled in a lot of the details that just aren't anywhere else because, well, the media is garbage in this age of extreme dichotomies, facts don't matter, and pundits lie to control what to think, where capital-drive lurid sensation is more important than human dignity.

Samantha Geimer very much sought to decide how to react to what was inflicted upon her and not be defined by it. The media has never made that an easy feat, trying to nail her to a single narrative. Samantha defied that. Bravo!

Samantha touches lightly upon a lot of points larger than her own tale: judicial malfeasance, celebrity power and the pursuit of that glammer, society's love of the victim narrative and rape culture. I agree with her on a lot of things, differing in only a few areas, but not by much.

After having been loudly and publicly dressed down at work for mentioning Cosby raping women (not one coworker thought to interfere - so much for all that workplace anti-violence training). I let him berate me until he ran out of steam and ended the conversation with one sentence, "He admitted to all of it." My coworker slunk away mumbling, "I don't know anything about that." Rape culture is real, alive, and seeks to destroy women and anyone who dares to stand up for victims. That's why Samantha's story is so important.

We claim that we want rapists, pedophiles, and people that harm women and children punished to the full extent of the law, but act in opposition to that, instead defending and excusing perpetrators - be they priests, celebrities, or sons - letting the justice system remain broken, and destroying victims. All to make ourselves feel good.

Spoiler: Samantha has forgiven Roman for his crimes against her. That's her personal decision and beyond questioning and reproach. She understand, forgiveness is not absolving perpetrators of their crimes, as we're taught in church, but letting go of the pain and the victimhood, and moving on. As Viktor Frankl taught us, no matter how bad the situation, you are free to choose how you react. A tough lesson when society dictates how you're supposed to react.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Zcorbain | 1 annan recension | Oct 13, 2023 |
An interview with Geimer in The Guardian and a review in The Observer by Victoria Coren made me buy this book. What Geimer has to say about the nature of 'victimhood' and the media's need for victims who feed the public's desire for stories of misery that make their own lives seem better is, to me, important. Geimer repeatedly makes the point that she is a survivor, not a victim, of Polanski's crime. It is tragic that Western society is incapable of celebrating that, and prefers to cast doubt on the character of rape survivors by implying that they must be sluts because they haven't allowed the crime to cripple them. Geimer is eloquent about this. Understandably, she comes across as angry at times, and occasionally the narrative flow suffers because of the repetition of complaints. The third section of the book felt like it was going round in circles at times, and threw up some contradictory attitudes. But I haven't been raped, so can't possibly know what it's like to reconstruct your life and deal with the aftermath of violation like that. I can understand Geimer's wish to be free of the story and not be framed as a victim every time Polanski is in the news, but I agree more strongly with the argument by Jaclyn Friedman quoted in the book that "Rape is a crime against the social fabric that binds all of us together... when the perpetrator goes unpunished, it makes all of us less safe."… (mer)
1 rösta
Flaggad
missizicks | 1 annan recension | Oct 20, 2013 |
Some tabloid stories/legal cases refuse to die. In 1977, celebrated movie director Roman Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. He took a plea deal on a lesser charge, and served a short prison sentence. After that, it gets complicated, but the short version is this: faced with the threat of additional prison time, Polanski fled to France, where he has lived ever since. He's not quite in exile, since he is a French citizen, but he has been unable to return to Hollywood. The case has been polarizing because Polanski is a famous director with a tragic past, and his artistic expression has been hampered by his inability to work in the United States. Some figure that "the girl" in the story must have brought the rape on herself, or that her mother must have led her own daughter to the casting couch.

"The girl," Samantha Geimer, is over 50 now. Her whole life has been affected by Polanski's criminal acts, but, other than that, there really isn't that much to tell. After years of hiding from reporters and numbing herself by using drugs, she got herself together. Now she has a good life with a happy marriage and children.

So why should she go public now? She doesn't say this explicitly, but I think her purpose is to exonerate her now-elderly mother. Geimer claims that it never occurred to her mother that Polanski could have a sexual interest in an only slightly developed thirteen-year old girl. That's why her mother let Geimer go to Jack Nicholson's house alone for a "photo shoot" with a much-older man. Geimer also wants the world to know that she, too, would like Polanski allowed back into the U.S, not that she ever wants to see him again.

The Girl has a lot of white space, a sure sign that it probably should have been a long-form magazine article instead of a book. It's a quick read, and Geimer emerges as a likable, sympathetic character. Polanski is depicted not so much as evil but as arrogant and selfish. The reader is left with the impression that Polanski was attracted to youth, and had no particular passion for Geimer--any girl could have served his purpose. For two people whose fates have been intertwined for over thirty years, the extent to which Polanski and Geimer remain strangers to each other is remarkable.
… (mer)
½
1 rösta
Flaggad
akblanchard | 1 annan recension | Oct 9, 2013 |
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2179897.html

It's a lucid and short book, where Samantha Geimer recounts the story of how Roman Polanski drugged and raped her at Jack Nicholson's house one evening in 1977, and her life before and after, particularly the subsequent legal battle (which she blames largely on the media-driven mentality of the judge in the case; Polanski was willing to settle on the terms agreed by her and her family). Judith Newman, her ghost-writer, has done a fantastic job of conveying Geimer's voice, and gets a deserved namecheck at the end.

I should say that I have not seen a single minute of any of Polanski's films, so I read it very much as a generic account of what happens when a famous man does a monstrous thing, rather than with any particular views on his gifts or otherwise as an artist. (On his artistic credentials, the point that struck me from the narrative was this: when he brought Samantha home after his assault, the point at which her mother and step-father smelt a rat was when he showed them the photographs he had been taking of her - they simply weren't very good.) One cannot help but be struck by the similarity of the arguments used on Polanski's behalf at the time to those used last year by apologists for Julian Assange, or by Dominique Strauss-Kahn's lawyers the year before. Nothing much has changed since 1977.
… (mer)
½
 
Flaggad
nwhyte | 1 annan recension | Oct 6, 2013 |

Priser

Statistik

Verk
2
Medlemmar
85
Popularitet
#214,931
Betyg
3.1
Recensioner
4
ISBN
12
Språk
1

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