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Entity magazines delves into the reason long sexual assault trials exhaust victims and cause them to abandon their pursuits for justice.

Everyone knows Roman Polanski’s seedy history — and the US Court’s four-decade efforts to have him extradited to the United States.

This pursuit is due to Polanski’s sexual assault of a 13-year-old girl. He fled the country and has not returned since. The state of this case has been the same for years.

However, Samantha Gemeir, now in her fifties, appeared in court Friday. Surprising the crowd, she defended Polanski, saying that both of their families had suffered enough.

Geimer cited the undue amount of attention their families receive as reason for defending Polanski. “I have now become a grandmother,” she said, per Deadline — lamenting the fact that she at times could not go outside because of what happened to her in 1977.

It’s definitely undeniable that Geimer’s family has suffered a great deal from Polanski’s actions, but it’s difficult to see how Polanski has suffered. Sure, he spent six weeks in a prison before he fled the country. He’s confined to France, Switzerland and Poland, according Bloomberg. But that seems to be the worst of his fallout.

Hollywood isn’t shy about working with him. He won the Academy Award in 2002 for “The Pianist” (Although he was unable to claim it). And another of his films screened at Cannes this year.

Polanski is one of many celebrities accused of sexual assault, and Samantha Geimer is one of many women who have decided the pursuit just isn’t worth the chaos it causes.

Kristina Ruehli, a Cosby accuser who sued him for defamation, dropped her case in 2016. It was the day after Cosby’s camp was denied its request to have the case dismissed. At that point, she’d spent $80,000 out of pocket, around two years in court and fifty years living with her assault according to WashPo.

The fact of the matter is that pursuing a sexual assault case is incredibly difficult. The majority of women don’t do it. The process often takes two to three years. It involves countless retellings of the incident. There’s potentially a four-hour medical examination and of course, there’s frequently a barrage of insults.

Amanda Marcotte of Slate said this of sexual assault, “Those who do report run a very high chance of never seeing a conviction… some because juries buy the defense attorney’s claim that the victim bizarrely preferred being publicly accused of being a slut and liar to quietly forgetting about a night of forced sex.”

And when the men that have been accused have money and status, that process can take way longer. Forty years longer.

So can you blame Samantha Gemeir for wanting a little peace?

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