WHICH WAS VOGUE'S POINT:

The dark secrets of Roman Polanksi (Christopher Sandford, 25th August 2007, Daily Mail)

Just before he returned to Los Angeles, however, the director accepted another commission to take a series of photographs - again of adolescent girls - this time for French Vogue's associate magazine Vogue Homme.

His idea was to "show them as they really are" - which meant "sexy, pert and thoroughly human" - and by adolescent, he meant girls of 13 or 14 years old.

When Polanski got to Los Angeles a friend suggested "the perfect candidate'" for these photographs - the younger daughter of an aspiring actress.

Samantha Jane Gailey was 13, but no innocent.

She would later explain that she'd had sex twice in the year before she met the director, that she'd drunk alcohol and that "once I was under the influence of Quaaludes [a sedative used as a recreational drug in the 70s] when I was real little".

But Gailey was also a schoolgirl who kept pet rats and had a Spiderman poster on her bedroom wall.

She was also four years under the age of sexual consent then required in the state of California - and 30 years younger than Polanski - but that didn't matter to him.

When a friend later asked about her age, he snapped: "She was about to turn 14."

Polanski set off to visit Gailey, and her mother, at their small, nondescript home in the western Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills on the afternoon of February 13, 1977.

The director was disappointed on first sight.

She was "a good looking girl, but nothing sensational", he said. Nevertheless he showed her the photographs he'd taken for French Vogue and she agreed to a shoot the following Sunday.

When Polanski arrived a week later he found Gailey waiting for him wearing a pair of jeans and a patchwork blouse.

The director proceeded to take the girl to an isolated spot half a mile away. Then, after a few shots, he asked her to remove her shirt.

The published photographs, he assured her, would be cropped so there would be no "boobies", as he called them. Polanski maintained later that Gailey was "entirely at ease".

The director didn't arrange to see Gailey again until Thursday, March 10.

This time Polanski first took her to actress Jacqueline Bisset's house and then to his friend Nicholson's mansion on Mulholland Drive.

The Oscar-winning actor wasn't there, but his then girlfriend, actress Anjelica Huston was.

On the way over Polanski was reported to have asked the girl whether she was "still a virgin" but the director insisted she said she started having sex "when I was eight".

When they reached Nicholson's house, Polanski gave the girl a glass of Cristal champagne and again asked her to pose topless, which he insisted she did "with great aplomb".

Shortly afterwards he also suggested she get into the Jacuzzi, and quickly produced a Quaalude, which she took.

"I can barely remember anything," Gailey told the Grand Jury later. "I was kind of dizzy, you know, like things were kind of blurry."

Polanski took more photographs, before taking off his own clothes and joining her in the Jacuzzi.

The girl asked to go home, and he told her "I'll take you home soon".

But when she repeated her request, he told her to lie down in a nearby guest house.

Polanski said afterwards that Gailey had quickly assured him she was feeling better - after which, he maintained, "very gently, I began to kiss and caress her".

But the 13-year-old girl's account was different.

She insisted that she told the director she wasn't feeling better, and when he kissed her she told him: "No" and "keep away".

In the next few minutes, according to the girl, Polanski raped and sodomised her.

He later described them as "making love" but Gailey violently disagreed.

When asked if she resisted, she said: "Not really - because I was afraid of him".

Eventually an unrepentant Polanski drove Gailey home.

When her mother and sister saw the topless shots, they were horrified.

But her mother was even angrier when she discovered that Polanski had actually had sex with her daughter - so angry that later that evening she made a formal complaint to the police.

The following evening Polanski was arrested in the foyer of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where he kept a suite.

Detective Philip Vannatter, a tenyear veteran, who 17 years later would go on to be lead investigator in the O.J. Simpson case, asked if Polanski had the slightest idea why he was being arrested. "I honestly don't know," the director replied.

Polanski's celebrity in Hollywood meant that he was never handcuffed.

Indeed one of the district attorneys called him a "great artist". Reality set in when the booking sergeant asked him: "What in hell do you think you're doing, going around raping kids?"

He treated her like the meat the "fashion" world wants them perceived as, no?

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 24, 2007 8:45 PM