SAMANTHA GEIMER

Roman Polanski's victim Samantha Geimer, now 45, 'got over it long ago'

Roman Polanski's most compelling defender is the woman he raped at Jack Nicholson's house when she was just 13.

Now 45, Samantha Geimer is a mother of three who lives quietly in Hawaii and works as a bookkeeper.

In January, Geimer, who publicly forgave Polanski in 1997, filed a formal request that Los Angeles prosecutors drop the charges against him.

"I have survived, indeed prevailed, against whatever harm Mr. Polanski may have caused me as a child," she said at the time. "I got over it a long time ago."

Geimer said Polanski had paid, and she wanted to move on and stop reliving the details of the assault every time he made headlines.

"True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me, my beloved husband, my three children and my mother," she said.

In 2003, she wrote a generous Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times, saying Polanski should not be barred from receiving a Best Director Oscar for "The Pianist."

"I don't really have any hard feelings toward him, or any sympathy, either. He is a stranger to me," she wrote.

The last time Geimer saw Polanski she was a 13-year-old aspiring model lured to a house in the Hollywood Hills for a photo shoot. Polanski plied her with champagne and a Quaalude and took nude pictures of her in a hot tub, despite her requests to go home.

She told the grand jury Polanski then had sex with her and that she was afraid to resist "much."

The director later pleaded guilty to having sex with a minor.

"What happened that night, it's hard to believe, but it paled in comparison to what happened to me in the next year of my life," she said last year, when she appeared in a documentary about problems with the case.

In the end, she was relieved when Polanski fled because reporters stopped calling.

"He did something really gross to me, but it was the media that ruined my life," she told People in 1997.

Geimer did not comment Sunday, when the events of 31 years ago resurfaced once more and reporters started knocking on her door again.

The New York Daily News.