Another Weinstein accuser describes 2006 alleged sexual assault
NEW YORK — A former production assistant who first publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of assault in 2017 gave a tearful account of the alleged 2006 episode on the witness stand Monday — and was confronted about her yearslong relationship with him that followed.
Mimi Haleyi, 42, said Weinstein forced her into his bedroom after she accepted what she thought was a friendly social invitation to meet at his condominium in New York’s SoHo neighborhood July 10, 2006. “I remember seeing children’s artwork on the walls,” she said of the décor in the room where she says she was pushed down on a bed by Weinstein.
Haleyi, who said she rejected prior advances by the powerful movie producer, testified that the visit quickly became a nightmare.
“He held me down on the bed and he forced himself on me orally,” she told a jury, blotting her eyes with tissues as she tried to compose herself. “I was on my period. I had a tampon in there. I was mortified.”
Weinstein, she said, ignored her repeated protests, as he overpowered her — he weighed about 300 pounds and she was 5-foot-5 and about 115 pounds, according to her testimony.
“I kept trying to tell him ‘no, don’t do that.’ I said ‘I’m on my period. I have a tampon in there,’ ” she said. “And it was as if he didn’t believe me and he said something like, ‘Well, where is it then?’ And he eventually pulled my tampon out.”
But Haleyi was forced to defend her version of events during rigorous cross-examination in which she was quizzed about why she willingly went to a Tribeca Grand Hotel room with Weinstein on July 26, 2006, and had sex with him, two weeks after she says he violently attacked her at his Manhattan home. She said she “didn’t resist” but did not want to have sex with Weinstein that day.
She struggled to explain why she decided to meet him in the
Lower Manhattan hotel room while the pain of her recent assault would have been raw.
“I had no reason not to,” she testified, adding that it “would have been odd to decline” after accepting his offer for a free trip to Los Angeles with an invitation to a movie premiere for Clerks 2.
She said she blew off the film event and spent two weeks on the West Coast with a friend.
A day after the second encounter, there was a note in her planner to “call [Weinstein’s assistant] about tix.” On Aug. 2, she flew to London, another trip she said was paid for by Weinstein.
She offered that the flight was probably booked “on [Weinstein’s reward] miles,” though she did not say how she could have known that and was not sure about it.
In the late July 2006 encounter, she now says Weinstein called her a “b---” and “whore” — insults she concedes she did not tell the District Attorney’s Office about when she was interviewed in June 2018, a short time after Weinstein’s May 2018 arrest. She guessed that the offensive names were a misguided attempt by Weinstein to turn her on.
Defense lawyer Damon Cheronis suggested Haleyi was trying to exploit a relationship with Weinstein to help her career. She sent him her friends’ scripts and pitched him her own production called Trash TV, while checking in with him periodically about whether he had any production gigs for her.
When she sent Weinstein’s assistant a memo on her Trash TV concept, she stressed that it was her own idea and asked him to forward it to Weinstein. “Because if it came from you, you thought he would be more likely to read it?” Cheronis asked.
“Probably, yes,” Haleyi said.