Sopranos star details alleged rape
ACTRESS DESCRIBES ALLEGED RAPE BY WEINSTEIN
Harvey Weinstein launched a campaign of increasingly menacing behaviour toward Sopranos star Annabella Sciorra, starting with a series of creepy gifts delivered to her home and ending with her rape one winter night in the early 1990s, she told a rapt courtroom in Manhattan on Thursday.
First Weinstein demanded that Sciorra star in a film he’d agreed to produce for her friend, and sent her a gift of classic films and popcorn — as well as a bottle of Valium — to “calm” her after she initially resisted the role out of exhaustion, she testified. Next came a box of chocolate penises, which she found “disgusting.”
Then, in late 1993 or early 1994, Sciorra told a jury of seven men and five women, Weinstein raped her in her Manhattan apartment.
The 59-year-old actor is the first of several women whom prosecutors plan to question to show a pattern of predatory behaviour in New York’s sexual assault case against Weinstein. The alleged attack occurred too long ago for the state to bring criminal charges. Instead, prosecutors are using her testimony to show that Weinstein, 67, engaged in a series of criminal acts.
Weinstein maintains that all his sexual encounters have been consensual.
Sciorra’s face reddened and she fought back tears as she recounted the alleged attack in her Gramercy Park home.
She told the jury Weinstein dropped her off after a dinner that included rising stars such as Uma Thurman. She said she was in a nightgown and ready for bed by 10 p.m. when there was a knock at the door. She was surprised to see Weinstein there, she testified. She said he pushed his way in and began circling her, perhaps checking to see if there was anyone else in the apartment, then started unbuttoning his shirt and pushing her into the bedroom as she tried to escape to the bathroom.
“I realize in his head he wanted to have sex, and I did not want to,” Sciorra told the jury. She said she asked Weinstein to leave. “This wasn’t romantic, and I wasn’t having sex, but he kept coming at me,” she said. Then, she told the panel, grasping the front of her dress, “he grabbed me.” She said he pulled her into the bedroom and shoved her onto the bed.
“I was punching him, kicking him, trying to get him off me,” Sciorra testified. “He took my hands, and he put my hands over my head,” she said, raising her arms to show them pinned. She said she weighed just over 100 pounds, while Weinstein was more than twice as large.
At the end, Sciorra said, Weinstein ejaculated on her leg and told her, “I have perfect timing.”
At an industry event about two weeks after the alleged attack, Sciorra said, she confronted Weinstein.
“I tried to talk to him about what happened,” she testified, “and I told him how I woke up and that I’d blacked out. And he said, ‘That’s what the nice Catholic girls say.’ Then he leaned into me and said, ‘This remains between you and I.’ He was very menacing. I thought he was going to hit me. I was afraid of him.”
Weinstein listened impassively, occasionally taking notes.
Sciorra struggled to keep her composure as she testified.
The Brooklyn-born actress also told the jury how she had begun drinking heavily after the incident and had become reclusive.
“I don’t remember much, except for feeling disgusting,” she said, recounting how the alleged attack even led her to self-harm.
Joan Illuzzi-orbon, prosecuting, asked Sciorra why she never told anyone what had happened to her.
“I wanted to pretend it never happened. I wanted to get back to my life,” she said.
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Illuzzi-orbon asked.
“Because he was someone I knew,” she said. “I would say I felt, at the time, that rape was something that happened in a dark alleyway, with someone you didn’t know.”
Cross-examining her, Donna Rotunno, Weinstein’s lead lawyer, said to Sciorra: “You are a professional actress, correct? Part of your job is to pretend to be someone you are not.” She then asked how long the entire alleged assault lasted.
“I don’t know,” Sciorra replied. “Time stood still.”
Sciorra also recounted her flight from Weinstein in 1994, in London, when he arrived at her hotel door and Matthew Vaughn, the British film producer, director and screenwriter, helped her move hotels to evade him.
Sciorra’s testimony falls outside the statute of limitations but is being used by the prosecution to bolster the case of their two accusers, Mimi Haleyi, a former production assistant, and Jessica Mann, the actress.
If convicted after the trial, expected to run until March, Weinstein could face life in prison.
THIS WASN’T ROMANTIC, AND I WASN’T HAVING SEX, BUT HE KEPT COMING AT ME.