‘I’m being raped’: Weinstein accuser details alleged assault
NEW YORK — Harvey Weinstein accuser Mimi Haleyi testified Monday that weeks after arriving in New York to work for one of his shows, she found herself fighting in vain as the once-revered showbiz honcho pushed her onto a bed and sexually assaulted her, undeterred by her kicks and pleas of, “no, please don’t do this, I don’t want it.”
Haleyi was the first to testify of the two women whose allegations led to Weinstein’s New York City criminal case. Sobbing at times, she described how the film producer turned a friendly meeting at his Manhattan apartment in June 2006 into a terrifying ordeal that had her contemplating escape plans as he forcibly performed oral sex on her.
“I was kicking, I was pushing, I was trying to get away from his grip,” the former “Project Runway” production assistant testified. “He held me down and kept pushing me down to the bed. Every time I tried to get up he pushed me down.”
Haleyi, now 42, told jurors she thought, “I’m being raped,” and wondered “If I scream rape, will someone hear me?” She said she told Weinstein she was menstruating in an attempt to deter him, but that didn’t stop him.
“I checked out and decided to endure it,” she said. “That was the safest thing I could do.”
Yet just two weeks later, Haleyi said, she was accepting an invitation to Weinstein’s hotel room, where he pulled her into bed for sex.
Haleyi said she “just felt like an idiot” for letting Weinstein persuade her to meet again but thought seeing him could help her regain power as she tried to make sense of the alleged assault. Haleyi said she didn’t want to be intimate with Weinstein, but said she didn’t think Weinstein forced her to have sex.
Weinstein lawyer Damon Cheronis zeroed in on Haleyi’s continued interactions with Weinstein, scrutinizing her emails and calendar entries marked “HW” during cross-examination. He noted that she kept exchanging warm messages with him, pitched him on a TV show and made several trips on his dime, including jetting off to Los Angeles the day after the alleged assault.
When they couldn’t connect before she left London, she sent Weinstein’s assistant an email lamenting: “totally bummed to have missed you guys.”