In the flat light of the grand-jury room, a nervous, deeply embarrassed 13-year-old girl sat alone — no attor ney, no mother, no friend.

The questions that day in March 1977 were clinical in tone.

The answers would set off a furor from Hollywood to London and Paris that has yet to subside.

Samantha Gailey — sandy brown hair, dimpled chin, missing class at her junior high in Woodland Hills — described her alleged rape by director Roman Polanski two weeks before at Jack Nicholson’s home above Franklin Canyon.

“After he kissed you, did he say anything?” asked the prosecutor, Roger Gunson.

“No,” the girl said.

“Did you say anything?”

“No, besides I was just going, ‘No, come on, let’s go home . . .’ He said, ‘I’ll take you home soon.’ ”

“Then what happened?”

“And then he went down and started performing cuddliness . . . He placed his mouth on my vagina . . . I was ready to cry. I was kind of — I was going, ‘No. Come on. Stop it.’ But I was afraid.”

Samantha’s testimony that day was unequivocal.

A generation of spectacle would follow: Polanski’s indictment, his plea deal, his flight from the country, allegations of judicial and prosecutorial misconduct, his decades of exile and critical success, his Oscar, a sympathetic HBO documentary last year, his rearrest in Switzerland last month.

Along the way, various people would scrub the core allegations into something more benign — a probation officer would deem the crime a “spontaneous” act of “poor judgment,” a prison psychiatrist would call it “playful mutual eroticism.”

But an extensive review of several thousand court documents, as well as numerous interviews, shows a basic dynamic defining the entire saga — one force trying to drive debate away from a young girl’s unshaken allegations, and another trying to reel it back in.

SAMANTHA had met Polanski through her mother, Susan, a televi sion actress. The director said he had an assignment to photograph young girls for a Paris fashion magazine, Vogue Hommes, and had heard about Samantha from a mutual friend.

Polanski went to her home on the afternoon of Feb. 20 and took some pictures in the hills nearby. He picked her up again on March 10, stopped at Jacqueline Bisset’s house and, as the light was fading, went to Nicholson’s compound on Mulholland Drive.

Polanski dropped Samantha off at her home a few hours later and went about his business. He met with Robert De Niro that evening to discuss making a movie based on a William Goldman novel, “Magic.”

The next night, a team of seven police investigators and prosecutors pulled up to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.

Polanski, 43, was meeting friends in the lobby.

The lead detective, Philip Vannatter, spotted him and strode up, quietly saying he had a warrant for his arrest and needed to search his room.

“We don’t want to create a sensation,” the detective said, according to Polanski’s 1984 autobiography. Polanski asked what the charge was.

“Rape.”

Polanski led him to the suite, according to Vannatter’s grand-jury testimony. As they walked, the detective saw him pull what looked like a tablet out of his coat pocket and lower his cupped hand, as if he were going to drop it on the floor.

Vannatter opened his hand below Polanski’s. “Why don’t you drop it into my hand instead of the floor?” he said. It was a quaalude pill, marked “Rorer 714.”

In the suite, Vannatter and his team collected cameras, lenses, film, slides and negatives, and found a small vial of prescription quaaludes. They arrested Polanski and drove to Nicholson’s house with another search warrant.

“He kept asking me if he could have the quaalude back all night because he was so nervous,” Vannatter said.

THE photos developed from Polanski’s film showed Samantha topless, drink ing champagne in a Jacuzzi. The pills matched the one she described. A police criminalist could not find sperm in her underwear, but a chemical test indicated semen.

The doctor who examined Samantha found no bruises or tearing, but would explain that this was common when no force was involved.

The district attorney took the case to the grand jury on March 24.

The first witness was Samantha’s mother, Susan Gailey.

When Polanski brought Samantha back from Jack Nicholson’s house, Gailey asked to see some of the photos from the previous shoot. Polanski brought a slide viewer from the car.

“We looked at about five or six that were just head shots,” she said. “And then all of the sudden there was a shot of Samantha bare to her waist with just her jeans on.”

Samantha’s sister, Kim, testified that later that night, Samantha’s boyfriend, Steve, came over and she heard the two of them talking about what had happened. Kim told her mother, who called the police.

Samantha described Polanski taking more topless shots, pouring them champagne, then later offering her part of a quaalude.

She had to admit she’d had sex before — twice, she said — had been drunk before, and had tried part of a quaalude before.

She continued: He took a few pictures, then went into the bathroom and came back naked. He got into the deep part of the hot tub.

“He goes, ‘Come on down here.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I got to get out.’ And he goes, ‘No, come down here.’ . . . So I finally went down . . . And he goes, ‘Doesn’t it feel better down here?’

“And I went, ‘Yeah, but I better get out.’ ”

Polanski jumped in the pool.

He coaxed her in.

“I said I wanted to go home because I needed to take my medicine . . . He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll take you home soon.’ ”

She said he started kissing her and then pulled off her panties.

She said he started performing oral sex on her and then moved to intercourse.

“He goes, ‘Are you on the pill?’ And I went, ‘No.’ And he goes, ‘When did you last have your period?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know . . . He goes, ‘Would you want me to go in through your back?’ And I went, ‘No.’ ”

She said a woman — later identified as Nicholson’s then-girlfriend, Anjelica Huston — came home and Polanski stopped briefly to talk to her through a crack in the door. “Then he started to have intercourse with me again and then he just stopped.”

On the drive home, Samantha said he told her “something like, ‘This is our little secret.’ “

THE grand jury deliberated just 23 min utes. The panel returned with an in dictment of Polanski on six counts: furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, perversion, sodomy, unlawful sexual intercourse, rape by use of drugs.

Polanski pleaded not guilty on April 15, and the case was transferred to the Santa Monica courtroom of Judge Laurence J. Rittenband.

In a pretrial hearing, Polanski’s attorney, Douglas Dalton, indicated that he would delve into Samantha’s sexual history and seek a psychiatric evaluation of her.

Her attorney told the court that Samantha did not want to go through a trial.

Things were looking bleak for Polanski as well. Vogue Hommes denied that he had any assignment, according to his autobiography. Huston, who could put him in the bedroom with the girl, agreed to testify against him in exchange for a cocaine-possession charge against her being dropped (from the search of Nicholson’s home).

The day before trial was to begin in August, the attorneys announced Polanski would plead guilty to “unlawful intercourse with a minor” in return for dropping of the more serious charges.

Rittenband accepted the plea deal.

But Polanski’s legal problems were not over. Rittenband could sentence him to up to 50 years in prison, although no one expected that. The sentence would likely depend on what the probation officer, Irwin Gold, recommended.

A psychiatrist, Dr. Alvin Davis, who analyzed Polanski for the report, concluded: “It is believed that incalculable emotional damage could result from incarcerating the defendant, whose own life has been a seemingly unending series of punishments.”

Judge Rittenband ordered Polanski to undergo a 90-day psychiatric study. Both Gunson and Dalton understood that this would be Polanski’s punishment, according to declarations they signed recently.

Polanski was released after 42 days.

The psychiatric report, made public in a recent appellate-court filing, echoed the probation report.

“There was no evidence that the offense was in any way characterized by destructive or insensitive attitude toward the victim,” wrote Philip S. Wagner, Chino’s chief psychiatrist.

Rittenband called the report a “whitewash.”

He met in chambers with Gunson and Dalton on Jan. 30 to discuss the sentencing two days later. He told them he wanted Polanski to do more time in prison — and then leave the country, according to the attorneys’ declarations. Rittenband said he would send him back to Chino for 48 days to complete the 90-day stint, then release him, if Polanski agreed to voluntary deportation. If not, he would face a longer prison term.

Polanski left the lawyer’s office, drove to LAX and bought the last seat on the next British Airways flight to London.

The banner headline the next day: “Polanski Flees!”

*

Just before New Year’s Eve 1988, Samantha Gailey, then 25 and living in Kauai, sued the director for sexual assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress and false imprisonment.

Polanski settled with Gailey on Oct. 12, 1993.

By Oct. 11, 1995, he still owed her $601,584, with interest.

The next year, Samantha publicly forgave Polanski.

“It wasn’t rape,” she told “Inside Edition.”

The same year, Polanski’s attorney met with Gunson, the prosecutor, in the chambers of Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler to discuss how the criminal case could be resolved. Samantha, now with the married name Geimer, wrote Fidler, urging leniency for Polanski and saying it was her opinion “that the 42 days he has already served is excessive.”

But the negotiations fell apart.

THE latest chapter of the saga began last year with the HBO documentary “Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired,” directed by Marina Zenovich.

Polanski’s lawyer, Dalton, told the filmmaker that Judge Fidler was ready to hold a hearing and let Polanski go without more time in custody, but wanted the hearing televised — a condition Polanski wouldn’t accept. A court spokesman, Alan Parachini, called this a “complete fabrication.”

Regarding Rittenband, Dalton and prosecutor Gunson recalled private meetings in which the judge told them what to argue at the sentencing hearing, even as his decision was already made. Another prosecutor, David Wells, said he was constantly in the judge’s ear about the case and planted the idea of the psychiatric study at Chino.

Polanski’s attorneys jumped on Wells’ statements as the key basis for a full-throttle push to have the case thrown out — their first public move in 30 years.

They even had a transcript of the filmmaker’s interview with Richard Doyle, one of current DA Steve Cooley’s bureau directors, saying he believed Rittenband abused his authority.

They filed a motion for dismissal on Dec. 8.

Judge Peter Espinoza said in February that Polanski needed to appear in court before he would hear the evidence. He hinted the director might have a case.

Polanski’s attorneys went to the appeals court in July with a petition to order the lower court to dismiss the prosecution.

“Despite feigning offense at Mr. Polanski’s absence from California, the district attorney has never sought extradition or other relief, knowing, of course, that such relief would require litigation of the misconduct in this petition,” they wrote.

On Sept. 22, Cooley drafted a warrant for his arrest. Polanski, now 76, was arrested four days later while getting off an airplane in Zurich.

Four days after that, Wells told the media he made up the stories in the documentary about Rittenband. “I’d like to speak of it as an inept statement, but the reality is that it was a lie.”

Polanski remains in custody, fighting his extradition. His attorneys said he will go bankrupt if he is held much longer. Last week, Switzerland’s top criminal court rejected Polanski’s appeal to be released on bail. Los Angeles Times