Harvey Weinstein accuser testifies she wanted to ‘destroy’ herself after assault
A woman who accused Harvey Weinstein of raping her in 2013 testified on Tuesday that the attack left her wanting to “destroy” herself.
The woman, a model and actor living and working in Rome who was in Los Angeles at the time for a film festival, is the first of eight Weinstein accusers set to testify in a courtroom in Los Angeles where the 70-year-old movie mogul is on trial on multiple counts of rape and sexual assault.
Most of the women said that their assaults began with what were supposed to be business meetings with Weinstein at hotels. However, the woman testifying on Tuesday said she was stunned to find Weinstein knocking at her door late on a night in February 2013 after she had seen him briefly earlier in the evening at the Los Angeles Italia film festival.
Staying in the hotel under a pseudonym, she said she had no idea how Weinstein even knew her room number and that she let him through her door initially without thinking there was any harm in it. That shifted quickly when Weinstein became sexually aggressive, she said.
The woman, whose first language is Russian, said that her English was very poor at the time though it has improved considerably since, and thought she might have miscommunicated.
“I was feeling guilty that I did something or said something that made him think something could happen between us,” she said.
She said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on her hotel bed. “I was kind of hysterical through tears,” she said. “I kept saying ‘no, no no.’”
She said she physically feared Weinstein, who outweighed her by 100 pounds or more, and that she had come from a rough background and had previously “been in bad situations where men beat me”.
During the assault, she said, she “didn’t have even one thought to run or to scream”. Prosecutor Paul Thompson asked why she didn’t.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I regret this a lot.”
She said that when Weinstein took her into the bathroom to rape her, she objected verbally, crying and saying “stop” and “no,” and moving so that it was harder for him to assault, but that she “didn’t fight”.
“I wanted to die,” she said. “It was disgusting. It was humiliating.”
She said that the day after the alleged attack, she began drinking heavily.
“I was destroying myself,” she said. “I was feeling very guilty. Most of all because I opened that door.”
She said she struggled to face her children after the incident, and felt the need to confess it to her Russian Orthodox priest. Prosecutors sought for the priest to testify, but he declined, citing religious privilege. The woman’s daughter, now 21, is set to testify later.
The woman cried occasionally during her testimony, but remained mostly composed, looking down when she grew emotional to gather herself.
On Monday, the opening day of the trial, she was sobbing so much in her account of the assault, court adjourned a few minutes early.
“I want to apologize for my breakdown yesterday,” she said when she returned to the stand Tuesday. “Unfortunately I cannot control that.”
In his opening statement, Weinstein attorney Mark Werksman said many of the counts his client is charged with were actually consensual sex that his accusers reframed after Weinstein became a lightning rod for the #MeToo movement in 2017.
But in the case of the woman testifying Tuesday, Werksman denied that the events in her hotel room happened at all.
During the cross examination, defense attorney Alan Jackson questioned the woman about her previous statements about the rape, and asked her why she would remain in a hotel room where she had been sexually assaulted and why she did not report the incident to hotel staff.
The woman’s name is not being revealed in court and is being referred to as “Jane Doe 1.”
Weinstein’s trial began this week, where he faces numerous charges of rape and sexual assault. The disgraced film producer, 70, is already serving a 23-year sentence after being convicted of sex crimes in New York in February 2020.