Sciorra v Weinstein
‘Sopranos’ actress has her day in court
Harvey Weinstein launched a campaign of increasingly menacing behaviour towards Sopranos star Annabella Sciorra, starting with a series of creepy gifts and ending with her rape one winter night in the early 1990s, she told a courtroom in Manhattan this week.
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 resisted the role because of exhaustion. 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 is the first of several women prosecutors plan to question to show a pattern of predatory behaviour in New York’s sexual assault case against Weinstein. The alleged attack of Sciorra occurred too long ago for the state to bring charges but 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.
She told the jury that Weinstein dropped her off after a dinner that included rising stars such as Uma Thurman. She was ready for bed when there was a knock at the door. It was Weinstein. He pushed her into the bedroom as she tried to escape to the bathroom.
“I realise 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.
“I was punching him, kicking him, trying to get him off me,” Sciorra testified. She said she weighed just over 100 pounds (45kg), and Weinstein was more than twice as heavy.
At an event about two weeks later, 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 in to me and said, ‘This remains between you and I.’ It was very menacing.”
Sciorra spent more than five hours on the stand. Assistant district attorney Meghan Hast told the jury Sciorra waited for decades before reporting the attack, for fear of retribution.