Actress Annabella Sciorra confronted Harvey Weinstein from the witness stand Thursday, telling a jury in a quivering voice that the burly Hollywood studio boss barged into her house within the mid-1990s, overpowered her and raped her as she tried to struggle him off by kicking and punching him.
She stated {that a} month later, she bumped into him and confronted him about what occurred, and he replied: “That is what all the great Catholic women say.”
Then, she advised the jury, Weinstein leaned towards her and added menacingly: “This stays between you and I.”
“I believed he was going to hit me proper there,” Sciorra testified.
At different factors within the 1990s, she stated, Weinstein despatched her packages with Valium and a field of chocolate penises and turned up early one morning at her Cannes Movie Competition resort room door “in his underwear with a bottle of child oil in a single hand and a videotape within the different.” She stated he finally left after she began frantically pushing buttons on the room cellphone to summon assist.
The 59-year-old actress turned the primary of Weinstein’s accusers to testify at his trial, the place the film mogul whose downfall gave rise to the #MeToo motion is charged with forcibly performing oral intercourse on former Challenge Runway manufacturing assistant Mimi Haleyi in his New York house in 2006 and raping an aspiring actress in a resort room in 2013.
Weinstein isn’t charged with attacking Sciorra, whose accusations date too far again to be prosecuted. As a substitute, she testified as considered one of 4 further accusers prosecutors intend to placed on the stand to point out that the highly effective Hollywood producer had a sample of preying on ladies. Weinstein, 67, may get life in jail if convicted.
Defence seems for inconsistencies
Weinstein, the chief behind such Oscar-winning motion pictures as Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love, has insisted any sexual encounters have been consensual.
Recounting an accusation she stated she saved largely secret for many years, Sciorra testified that after raping her, Weinstein went on to attempt to carry out oral intercourse on her, saying, “That is for you,” as her physique “shut down.”
“It was simply so disgusting,” she stated. She stated she began to shake: “I did not even know what was occurring. It was like a seizure or one thing.”
WATCH | Actress tells Weinstein trial that he raped her within the early 90s:
The defence tried to seed doubts about Sciorra’s allegations, and she or he gave a barely completely different model beneath their questioning, testifying that when the producer initially pushed her onto her mattress, “he was type of, in a pleasant manner, making an attempt to persuade me” into having intercourse. She refused and shortly discovered herself making an attempt to get him off of her, she stated.
Weinstein lawyer Donna Rotunno famous that Sciorra by no means went to police or a health care provider concerning the alleged rape.
“On the time, I did not perceive that that was rape,” Sciorra stated.
Rotunno additionally urged that Sciorra’s judgment and recollection have been clouded by consuming. The actress stated she remembered having solely a glass of wine with dinner and had kicked a Valium behavior that developed after Weinstein despatched her tablets.
In opening statements on Wednesday, one other Weinstein lawyer, Damon Cheronis, argued the encounter was consensual, not rape, saying Sciorra as soon as advised a buddy that she “did a loopy factor and had intercourse with Harvey Weinstein.”
The Related Press doesn’t usually establish individuals who say they’ve been victims of sexual assault, except they arrive ahead publicly.
Sciorra drew popularity of her half in Spike Lee’s 1991 film Jungle Fever and her position as a pregnant girl molested by her physician in 1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle the subsequent yr. She later appeared on The Sopranos.
Sciorra first made her allegations in a New Yorker article in 2017.
She stated she met Weinstein at an business occasion in Los Angeles in 1990 or 1991. By 1993, she had starred in considered one of his firm’s motion pictures — the romantic comedy The Night time We By no means Met.
She stated the rape occurred in late 1993 or early 1994, after Weinstein dropped her off from a movie-business dinner after which appeared, uninvited, at her door a couple of minutes later.
Sciorra stated afterward, she began to chop herself and really feel she did not need to depart her home. On the identical time, she stated, she struggled with understanding that what occurred to her was against the law.
“I believed he was an OK man. I felt confused. I felt like I wanted I by no means opened the door,” she stated. She stated she advised nobody at first, not even her brothers.
“I wished to faux it by no means occurred. … I wished to get again to my life,” she advised the jury. She didn’t come ahead publicly till 2017.
