You Must Remember Manson · Karina Longworth

E10: Roman Polanski After Sharon Tate

November 20, 2017·41 min·2 clips

Samantha's own words describe the moment Roman Polanski assaulted her in Jack Nicholson's jacuzzi.

August 1969 left Hollywood without answers. Sharon Tate, Rosemary LaBianca, and five others had been murdered, but the public still did not know who had done it or why. Suspicion did the work instead. The host presents those months as a vacuum where Hollywood, Los Angeles, and the wider world chose paranoia because evidence had not arrived yet. Bobby Beausoleil was already in custody for the Gary Hinman killing. The connection to Charles Manson and his family was still not public, even though the later killings had copied parts of the Hinman crime scene. Polanski wanted revenge at first. A woman came forward for his cash reward, and a young boy found the broken gun Tex Watson had thrown away after using it on Wojciech Frykowski. Then the fantasy of revenge went flat. Knowing who killed Sharon Tate did not end Polanski's grief. It also did not quiet the guilt that he might somehow have fought them off. He left Los Angeles. The move feels less like escape than retreat, pushed along by his hatred of a press that spread lies, half-truths, and exaggerations about him, Sharon, and the other victims. Europe does not clean the story up. In Paris, paparazzi stayed close enough that Polanski confronted a photographer and took the film by force. The Swiss Alps brought another rejection when an exclusive club blackballed him for his connection to what people still called the crime in Los Angeles. So he made his own circle. The transcript then turns, dryly and sharply, to teenage girls from a local boarding school and Polanski waiting outside their dormitory in the snow. The episode does not let grief wash anything away. It leaves him as a man shaped by his era, not excused by it, moving through sorrow, suspicion, privilege, and appetite.

As heard by us

A sharp, uneasy account of Polanski after Tate, where grief, press fury, exile, and moral evasion crowd the same frame.

Roman Polanski after Sharon Tate is a study in grief curdling into flight, grievance, and self-mythology. Karina Longworth begins in the fearful months after the murders, when nobody outside the investigation knew who had done it and Hollywood filled the silence with suspicion.

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Why you'd press play

When you want the fallout of Sharon Tate's murder, not another retelling of the killing itself.

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