Inside ‘$ex Offender Harvey Weinstein’s Victim Described The Alleged 2013 Assault’ In her testimony on Tuesday, a model and actress claimed that despite her desperate pleas for the former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein to cease sexually assaulting her in her hotel room in 2013, he persisted and then pretended “nothing had happened.”
$ex Offender Harvey Weinstein’s Victim Described The Alleged 2013 Assault
“I wanted to die. It was disgusting. It was humiliating and miserable. I didn’t fight,” she said. “I remember how he was looking in the mirror and he was telling me to look at him. I wish this never happened to me.”
The woman began her testimony by apologizing “for my breakdown yesterday.” Judge Lisa B. Lench ended court about 30 minutes early Monday after the woman began sobbing during testimony and appeared inconsolable.
Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson told her she didn’t need to apologize and could take a break any time.
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Over the next approximately 90 minutes, Thompson asked the woman a series of questions about how she met Weinstein and what exactly happened between them, eliciting emotional testimony about an alleged attack the woman recounted to a close friend shortly after it happened — as well as to her daughter later on.
The woman traveled to Los Angeles in February 2013 to attend the annual Los Angeles Italia Film Festival, walking the red carpet and schmoozing with stars such as Al Pacino. She met Weinstein at a VIP event, then was surprised when he showed up at her hotel. He walked into her room and the two discussed their children when Weinstein began talking about a massage. A native Russian speaker, the woman spoke limited English then and worried she might have given Weinstein the wrong impression.
“I was feeling guilty that I did something or said something that made him think that something can happen between us,” she said.
She said Weinstein’s face, eyes, and behavior changed, and she feared for her safety.
“I’ve been in bad situations where men beat me. I was risking death, so I was, yes, I was physically afraid of him,” she testified.
She said Weinstein was “arrogant” and “giving orders” but wasn’t loud and didn’t scream or turn violent. But she was “kind of hysterical through tears,” testifying Tuesday she was “panicking with fear.” When Thompson asked why she didn’t fight back, she answered, “I don’t know. I regret this a lot.”
“I didn’t have even one thought to run or to scream. I didn’t know how loud I was. I think enough loud that people could hear me from another room . . . but I didn’t scream for help. I can do more,” the woman said.
She said Weinstein “had trouble with an erection” and “walked” her into the bathroom, where he pulled her in front of the sink and stood behind her, masturbating and then raping her.
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“I was crying. I say ‘stop,’ I say ‘no,” she recalled. She said Weinstein told her, “C’mon little girl, tell me you like it. You like it,” as he assaulted her.
Afterward, “he was acting as nothing happened. He was giving me compliments,” she testified.
She says she cleaned the room after Weinstein left and found his jacket. She understood him to be “somebody powerful” so didn’t want to talk about what happened, but she said she called a longtime friend and told that person what had happened. The friend — a woman — urged her to return home to Italy.
The witness said she didn’t attend the festival the next day, testifying that she drank alcohol instead. But she attended the festival later, abnormally drinking a lot of alcohol, which she characterized as part of her post-assault self-destructive behavior. She was in a theater during the festival, arriving with Quentin Tarantino and Christoph Waltz when she saw Weinstein arrive. She spent a few more days in Los Angeles before returning to Italy.
She said she “confessed” the assault to her priest, then in 2017 spoke about it with her daughter after her daughter had a similar experience with a boy. Her daughter “screams at me that I do not understand what she’s feeling,” the woman said. That made her feel “miserable”: “I say that I very understand what she’s going through.”
This is a developing story.
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