I was raped by Weinstein, Sopranos star tells US court
ACTRESS Annabella Sciorra has confronted Harvey Weinstein from a New York witness box, her voice quivering as she recounted a rape accusation she kept largely private for decades.
“I was punching him. I was kicking him. I was just trying to get him off of me,” after he pushed his way into her apartment and pinned her on a bed in the early 1990s, Sciorra told the jury.
She said he overpowered her, seizing her hands and holding them over her head, and raped her.
“I didn’t have very much fight left inside me,” Sciorra said. “My body shut down.
“It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake in a way that was very unusual.
“I didn’t even know what was happening. It was like a seizure or something.”
That touched off several years of Weinstein tormenting Sciorra, prosecutor Meghan Hast said in her opening statement, culminating in an incident at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 in which he arrived at her hotel door in his underwear, with a bottle of baby oil in hand.
A petrified Sciorra ran to the back of the room and started hitting call buttons, at which point Weinstein left, Hast said.
When she ran into him about a month after the incident in her flat, she confronted him about what had happened, and he said: “That’s what all the nice Catholic girls say”, Sciorra told
the court yesterday. Then, she said, he leaned toward her and said menacingly: “‘This remains between you and I’. I thought he was going to hit me right there,” Sciorra said.
For more than a quarter of a century, the former Sopranos actress told her story to only a few people close to her about the encounter, until she came forward publicly in 2017.
Now, Sciorra has become the first of Weinstein’s accusers to give evidence at his New York City rape trial, seen as a water
shed for the #MeToo movement.
The New York trial involves just a pair of the dozens of allegations that surfaced against Weinstein in recent years.
He is charged with forcibly performing oral sex on a production assistant in his apartment in 2006 and raping an actress in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.
Sciorra’s allegations date back too long to be prosecuted on their own, but her evidence could ultimately be a factor as prosecutors look to show that Weinstein has engaged in a pattern
of predatory behaviour.
Her evidence about events in the 1990s could give the jury of seven men and five women a sense of the breadth of Weinstein’s alleged wrongdoing and insight into the power dynamics at play in his interactions with young actresses.
Prosecutors previewed Sciorra’s evidence in a lengthy, attimes graphic opening statement that painted Weinstein as a sexual predator who used his film industry clout to abuse women for decades.