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. ( )

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." ( )