Polanski's version of the story is a bit different, if I recall his autobiography correctly. Also, I think that he pleaded guilty to engaging in unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, not to rape, under the terms of his plea bargain. It was only after hearing that the judge was going to disregard that plea bargain that he fled the US.
I don't approve of what he did, but I suspect that the 13-yo and her mother were far from the innocents they've been portrayed to be. Plenty of 13-year-olds (and their parents) have done more to get their share of the limelight.
There could also be false-memory syndrome involved, though I'm not saying that is or is not the case here. The legal system really puts kids through the wringer, and when they have detectives, psychologists and social workers repeating the same questions over and over through dozens or hundreds of hours of interviews, the kids start to generate stories that fit the questions and become unable to distinguish their real memories from these manufactured ones. The classic example is the mousetrap experiment, where children were asked a series of questions multiple times by an interviewer, and in each interview, they were asked if they'd ever caught their hand in a mousetrap. None of them had, and they all answered in the negative at the beginning of the study, but as the study progressed and the question was repeated over and over during different sessions, many of them came to believe that they had caught their hand in a mousetrap, and made up elaborate stories about going to hospital and so on, none of which was real, but which was firmly believed by the kids.
Several years ago I described the case of a 14 year old boy named Chris, who was led to believe, by his older brother Jim, that he had been lost in a shopping mall at about the age of five and ultimately rescued by an elderly person (Loftus, 1993; Loftus & Ketcham, 1994). Chris's experience provided the idea for a formal study in which people might be led to have childhood memories for events that never happened.
A variation of this procedure has also been used with children whose ages ranged from 3 to 6 (Ceci, Huffman et al, 1994). They were interviewed individually about real (parent- supplied) and fictitious (experimenter-contrived) events, and had to say whether each event happened to them or not. One "false" events concerned getting one's hand caught in a mousetrap and having to go to the hospital to get it removed; another concerned going on a hot air balloon ride with their classmates. The children were interviewed many times. As for the false memories, the young children (3-4 years old) assented to them 44% of the time during the first session, and 36% of the time during the seventh session. The false event was remembered at a somewhat lower rate (25% in the first session, 32% in the seventh session) for the older children (5-6 years old). In another study, involving children of the same age but involving more interviews about different fictitious items (ie falling off a tricycle and getting stitches in the leg), the rate at which children bought into the false memory increased steadily with more interviews (Ceci, Loftus et al, 1994).
Taken together, these results show that people will falsely recall childhood experiences in response to misleading information and the social demands inherent in repeated interviews. The process of false recall appears to depend, in part, on accessing some relevant background information. Hyman and his colleagues hypothesized that some form of schematic reconstruction may account for the creation of false memories. What people appear to do, at the time they encounter the false details, is to call up schematic knowledge that is closely related to the false event.
Furthermore, said Johnson, "these false memories can contain quite specific details." In studies where children have been induced to provide "compellingly vivid accounts of complex events," such as having their finger caught in a mousetrap, experts "can't tell the difference between children's accounts of true and false memories" when viewing videos of the children recounting the events.
Such induced autobiographical memories reflect a number of factors," she noted. "Repeated questioning or thinking about an event increases the details that are remembered or confidence in the memory. Encouraging participants to embed a 'memory' in personally relevant details creates supporting evidence. Also, individuals with high imagery ability seem to be more susceptible to induced false memories, presumably because they embellish more or create representations that are more like perceptions."
In real life, the creation of memories about real events is "influenced by our expectations, imaginations and other ruminations, seeing photographs, hearing other people's accounts, and even seemingly unrelated events, and by our goals and motives at the time of remembering," explained Johnson.
"False memories arise from the same encoding, rehearsal, retrieval, and source monitoring processes that produce true memories; thus one can never be absolutely sure of the truth of any particular memory," she noted. "Remembering is always a judgment call."
