Gore Vidal

Author Gore Vidal says he refuses to feel any sympathy for Roman Polanski’s rape victim, whom he dubs a “hooker.”

In an interview with The Atlantic, the controversial 83-year-old author of such books as “Myra Breckinridge” and “1876” says of the director’s sex scandal, “I really don’t give a [expletive]. Look am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s being taken advantage of?”

The young woman to whom he is referring is Samantha Geimer, who was a 13-year-old aspiring model in 1977 when she was drugged and raped by Polanski.


Vidal went on to say that the media pushed an inaccurate image of Geimer, painting her as an innocent victim as opposed to what he believes to be her true identity.

Click here to read the interview in The Atlantic.

“I was in the middle of all that,” he says of the scandal. “Back then, we all were. Everybody knew everybody else. There was a totally different story at the time that doesn’t resemble anything that we’re now being told.”

Worse, Vidal claims that it is the media’s vehement “anti-Semitic and anti-fag thing” that led to the persecution of Polanski, who is Jewish and was born in Poland.

SLIDESHOW: Anatomy of the Roman Polanski Sex Scandal

“The media can’t get anything straight … The idea that this girl was in her communion dress, a little angel all in white, being raped by this awful Jew, ‘Polacko’ – that’s what people were calling him – well, the story is totally different now from what it was then … Anti-Semitism got poor Polanski.”

Polanski, now 76, was arrested in Switzerland last month and is pending extradition. He has been living in France since he fled the U.S. in 1978, a year after pleading guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with an underage girl.

The director of such classic films as "Chinatown" and "Rosemary's Baby" has asked a U.S. appeals court in California to overturn a judges' refusal to throw out his case. He claims misconduct by the now-deceased judge who had arranged a plea bargain and then reneged on it.

Just three days ago, Geimer, now 46, asked the court to drop all charges against the director, claiming that the unwanted publicity has harmed her health, work and family.