Annabella Sciorra testifies that Harvey Weinstein raped her: ‘It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake’
WASHINGTON POST
“He put my hands over my head like this,” she said, stretching her hands in the air to demonstrate for this jury.
Weinstein, who had been watching her from the defense table, turned his gaze away from his accuser as she detailed the encounter.
“He got on top of me and he raped me,” Sciorra said. During the alleged assault, she said, Weinstein performed oral sex on her, announcing that “This is for you.”
Sciorra, 59, is the prosecution’s bold-name witness; she has appeared in numerous movies stretching back to the early 1990s (“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”) and TV shows including “The Sopranos,” for which she earned an Emmy nomination.
In her five hours of testimony, she described freezing after the attack, adding that “It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake.”
She said she had no romantic interest in Weinstein. The film producer arrived at her Manhattan apartment uninvited one night in late 1993 or early 1994 after a group dinner they both attended nearby.
Weinstein had dropped her off at her building and left, and she went upstairs to get ready for bed, dressing in a white nightgown that was a family heirloom from Italy.
Weinstein managed to get to the 17th-floor apartment without a call-up from her doorman, and he forced his way inside, Sciorra told jurors.
Sciorra said she told her close friend, “White Men Can’t Jump” star Rosie Perez, about the rape around the time it happened. Perez may later testify to the details of the conversation.
Sciorra arrived in the courtroom with prosecutors shortly after 9 a.m., wearing a navy dress. She avoided looking at Weinstein’s defense table as she walked to the witness stand but rose from the stand to point at him when she was asked by prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon to identify her attacker.
In 1997, Sciorra agreed to take a part in “Copland,” a film produced by Miramax, Weinstein’s company. When she and fellow cast members, including Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, were at Cannes Film Festival promoting the movie, Weinstein knocked on her hotel room door at 5 a.m. and pushed his way in, Sciorra testified. She had opened the door, believing it may have been a wake-up call for a work obligation.
“When I opened the door, the defendant was in his underwear with a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a videotape in the other,” she said.
Sciorra said she panicked and started dialing the front desk. Hotel staff arrived and Weinstein left.
And at one point over the years, Sciorra said, she confronted Weinstein, but his response only instilled further fear. She “tried to talk to him about what happened” and told him “how I woke up and that I blacked out, fainted.”
He responded that “That’s what all the nice Catholic girls say,” the actress said.
But his eyes “went black” and turned “very menacing,” she said. “He leaned into me and said, ‘this remains between you and I.’ ”
Sciorra said on direct examination that she met Weinstein around 1990 or 1991 at a party in Los Angeles that her agent took her to. “I don’t remember anything remarkable about the conversation [at the party], only that he gave me his card and said that if I came across any scripts he was looking for some good scripts.”
She said she accepted a ride from Weinstein to the place she was staying in Malibu, but the interaction was professional.
Weinstein also is charged with raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann in 2013 and with forcing a sex act on former production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006.
Sciorra’s allegations are included in the predatory sexual assault counts he faces — the top charges — for allegedly committing a pattern of sex offenses. If convicted on predatory sexual assault, he faces 10 years to life in prison.
On cross-examination, defense lawyer Donna Rotunno confronted the witness about why she didn’t complain to management at the Gramercy Park building or ask her doorman to explain how Weinstein got up to her apartment unannounced around 1 a.m. The lawyer suggested that Sciorra also told a onetime Miramax employee that she had “awkward sex” with Weinstein — but Sciorra flatly denied ever saying that.
Rotunno played a scene from a lighthearted Sciorra interview on the “Late Show With David Letterman” on Aug. 6, 1997, during which she admits to spewing elaborate lies in professional interviews to cover up details of her private life.
“I have a bad reputation, and I was caught recently in the last couple of years lying about quite a few things,” she told Letterman with a wide grin. “There was one that I made up about Dennis Hopper and my father raising iguanas for the circus, or something like that.”
Letterman asked her how he could know she wasn’t lying in his interview that day.
“You don’t!” Sciorra said.
“Nothing further,” Rotunno said.
Weinstein’s defense started trying to poke holes in the case in opening statements Wednesday, pointing to Mann’s long history with Weinstein.
She swapped warm and “loving” emails with him for four years after she now says she was violently assaulted. In that time, they carried on a sexual relationship and referred to him as her “casual boyfriend.”
At one point, she broke up with a boyfriend while still involved with Weinstein, his lawyer Damon Cheronis told the jury.
Mann also sent repeated emails trying to set up dates with him in the years after the alleged attack at a Doubletree Hotel in Manhattan.
In 2009, three years after her alleged unwanted encounter with Weinstein, Haleyi emailed him asking him to set her up with a gig in London because she was “saving up to become a kundalini yoga teacher” and needed cash.
None of the accusers who will testify reported the alleged events to law enforcement before the dawn of the #MeToo movement in October 2017.
They met at a party in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. She was an up-and-coming actress. He was a young producer. As they got to know each other over the next few years, there were, she said, some “inappropriate” gestures: a care package of popcorn and Valium, a box of chocolate penises.
Then, Annabella Sciorra said on the witness stand on Thursday, Harvey Weinstein raped her.
Fighting back tears, Ms. Sciorra testified in excruciating detail to a hushed courtroom about the night she said she was attacked. After shoving his way into her Manhattan apartment, she said, Mr. Weinstein took her to a bedroom, forced her onto the bed and, as she sought to fight him off, sexually assaulted her.
“I was trying to get him off me,” Ms. Sciorra told the jury, her voice cracking with emotion. “I was punching him, kicking him.” But Mr. Weinstein held her down, she said, adding: “He got on top of me and he raped me.”
The testimony in State Supreme Court in Manhattan marked the first time that one of Mr. Weinstein’s numerous accusers took the stand at a long-awaited criminal trial that has come to symbolize the #MeToo movement.
Several women are expected to testify during the trial that Mr. Weinstein attacked them, though Mr. Weinstein faces charges of rape and criminal sexual act based on the allegations of only two of them. The judge is allowing the others to testify to establish a pattern of behavior, even though most of their allegations are too old to qualify as crimes under state law.
Ms. Sciorra’s encounter with Mr. Weinstein also happened too long ago to be charged as a rape, but prosecutors are using her testimony to bolster a charge of predatory sexual assault. That count carries a possible life sentence and requires the state to prove Mr. Weinstein committed a serious sexual offense against at least two people.
Mr. Weinstein, now 67, faces charges that he raped an aspiring actress in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and forced oral sex on a production assistant in his TriBeCa apartment in 2006.
Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers maintain that the women willingly had sex with him to advance their careers, and that some of them continued intimate relationships with him after the alleged attacks.
Ms. Sciorra, who is best known for her role in “The Sopranos,” said the assault took place in her apartment in Gramercy Park in either late 1993 or early 1994.
That night, she said, she had joined Mr. Weinstein at an uneventful dinner with several other people at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Mr. Weinstein gave her a ride home, she said, and after he dropped her off at 10 p.m., she went upstairs, got into a nightgown and brushed her teeth, preparing herself for bed.
Moments later, she recalled, there was a knock at her door and she thought it was a neighbor or her doorman. But when she opened the door, she said, Mr. Weinstein pushed his way inside.
When Mr. Weinstein unbuttoned his shirt, she said, she realized “he thought we were about to have sex.” She said that she considered running into her bathroom, but before she could, Mr. Weinstein grabbed the front of her nightgown, pushed her into a bedroom, and raped her on the bed, pinning her arms above her head.
“I said, ‘No, no,’ but there was not much I could do,” she said. “My body shut down. It was so disgusting my body started to shake in a way that was unusual. It was like a seizure or something.”
Mr. Weinstein walked out, she said, and she lost consciousness. “I woke up, but I’m not sure if I fainted, blacked out or fell asleep,” she said. She was on the floor with her nightgown pushed up, she said.
Several weeks later, she said, she confronted Mr. Weinstein at a restaurant about the incident. “This remains between you and I,” she recalled Mr. Weinstein telling her.
“It was very menacing,” she said. “His eyes went black — I thought he was going to hit me right there.”
Ms. Sciorra said that she never called the police. “He was someone I knew,” Ms. Sciorra said. “I felt at the time that rape was something that happened in a back alleyway in a dark place.”
Ms. Sciorra said the attack left emotional scars. She started to drink heavily and even began cutting herself. Sometimes, she recalled, she would slice her hands and fingers and paint a white wall in her apartment “blood red.”
In the years after the assault, Ms. Sciorra said, Mr. Weinstein continued to harass her. On one occasion, she recalled, he showed up unannounced at her hotel room in London, so she changed rooms in the middle of the night.
In 1997, Ms. Sciorra told the jury, she went to the Cannes Film Festival to promote her movie “Cop Land.” One morning, at 5 a.m., she said, she opened the door of her hotel room to find Mr. Weinstein standing in the hallway in his underwear. He had a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a videotape in the other.
“I couldn’t get past him,” Ms. Sciorra said. She said she “pressed all of the call buttons” on the telephone. “People came,” she added, “and he left.”
She said she remained mostly silent about the incidents until October 2017, when she spoke to a journalist — likely a reference to Ronan Farrow, who published an account of the alleged rape in Manhattan in The New Yorker.
“I was afraid for my life,” Ms. Sciorra said.
Donna Rotunno, one of Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, attempted to discredit Ms. Sciorra’s testimony on cross-examination, pointing out that the actress could not remember the exact date of the alleged assault and several other details about the night.
Ms. Rotunno also asked Ms. Sciorra why she would open her apartment door without first finding out who might be on the other side.
“So, you hear this knock, you’re in a nightgown and you don’t say, ‘Who is it?’” Ms. Rotunno asked.
“No,” Ms. Sciorra answered. “I opened the door and he was right there.”
Ms. Rotunno asked Ms. Sciorra why she did not flee. “He was too big,” the witness answered. The defense lawyer asked why she never called the doorman to inquire why he had let Mr. Weinstein in without her permission. “I was devastated,” Ms. Sciorra said.
Ms. Sciorra acknowledged to Ms. Rotunno that after the alleged assault, she did not see a doctor, or call the police. She said she told only two friends what had happened, one of them the actress Rosie Perez.
“At the time,” Ms. Sciorra said, “I didn’t understand that was rape.”
“You were 33 years old, if your timeline is correct,” Ms. Rotunno said.
Ms. Rotunno later played the jury a video clip of Ms. Sciorra appearing on “Late Show With David Letterman” in 1997. In the clip, Ms. Sciorra admitted that she had made up little lies about her life, saying, for instance, that her father had once raised iguanas in the circus.
In a rebuttal minutes later, the lead prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi asked Ms. Sciorra if she had ever lied about matters as serious as her allegations against Mr. Weinstein. “No,” she replied.
“This is not a tale?” Ms. Illuzzi said.
“No,” Ms. Sciorra said.
Rosie Perez, at Weinstein Trial, Backs Up Rape Allegation
NY TIMES
One night, at the end of 1993, Rosie Perez called her old friend, Annabella Sciorra, looking to go out and have some fun. Ms. Sciorra, a fellow Brooklyn actress, answered the phone in a strange whisper. Ms. Perez asked her what was wrong.
“She said, ‘I think I was raped,’” Ms. Perez testified on Friday at Harvey Weinstein’s trial. Ms. Perez asked the inevitable question: “Do you know who did it?”
At the time, Ms. Sciorra could not, or would not, name her attacker. Instead, she broke into tears and said, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and she hung up the phone, Ms. Perez said.
But in another call a few months later, Ms. Perez added, Ms. Sciorra finally identified the man she claimed had assaulted her: It was Mr. Weinstein.
“She swore me never to tell anybody,” Ms. Perez said. “I told her to go to the police, and she said: ‘I can’t. He will destroy me. He will destroy my career.’”
Ms. Perez appeared in court on Friday as a prosecution witness, called to the stand at the trial, in Manhattan, to bolster Ms. Sciorra’s own testimony that Mr. Weinstein assaulted her.
On Thursday, a tearful Ms. Sciorra, known for her work in “The Sopranos,” told the jury that Mr. Weinstein pushed his way into her Gramercy Park apartment and raped her after giving her a ride home from a dinner party.
Mr. Weinstein’s trial is widely seen as a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement and has delved into complicated issues of consent and power dynamics in professional situations. Ms. Perez’s account touched upon another common theme of sexual assaults: how women often delay reporting attacks and live with them in silence.
Mr. Weinstein’s trial is widely seen as a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement and has delved into complicated issues of consent and power dynamics in professional situations. Ms. Perez’s account touched upon another common theme of sexual assaults: how women often delay reporting attacks and live with them in silence.
On cross-examination, Damon Cheronis, one of Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, cut straight to that point. Under his questioning, Ms. Perez acknowledged that, even though one of her best friends had just said she was raped, they did not speak for a couple of days.
“I tried to — she didn’t want to talk about it,” Ms. Perez told the jury. “She was still very upset.”
As months went by, Ms. Perez said, Ms. Sciorra would mention the alleged assault at times, but did not want to share details.
“It was very, very traumatic for her,” Ms. Perez said, “and it was traumatic for me.”
Then in 1994, when Ms. Sciorra was in London filming “The Innocent Sleep,” the two friends spoke by phone. Ms. Sciorra told Ms. Perez that Mr. Weinstein was “harassing her” — he had banged on the door of her hotel room — and that she was “scared he was going to get her again,” Ms. Perez said.
It was during that call, Ms. Perez told the jury, that she “put two and two together” and guessed it was Mr. Weinstein who Ms. Sciorra said had attacked her months earlier. “She started screaming,” Ms. Perez said. “And I tried to calm her down.”
Six women are expected to testify against Mr. Weinstein at the trial. He is accused of five felony counts, including rape and predatory sexual assault, and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of the last charge.
His lawyers argue that the women who have accused him had sex with him willingly to advance their careers. Prosecutors claim he lured his accusers to meetings with promises of work, and then physically overpowered them.
The accusations against the producer came to a head in October 2017, when revelations about his alleged serial abuses were published in The New York Times and The New Yorker. More than 90 women have since come forward to accuse Mr. Weinstein of sexual misconduct.
As allegations about his mistreatment of women began to grow and circulate, the producer became increasingly concerned about “the nature of articles” that were set to be published about him, said Sam Anson, a private investigator who testified on Friday before Ms. Perez took the stand.
Two months before the articles in The Times and The New Yorker appeared, Mr. Anson said that he received an email from Mr. Weinstein asking him to investigate a list of “red flags,” people who Mr. Weinstein thought were speaking about him to the media. Among the targets was Ms. Sciorra.
“He was concerned that people on the list might be providing information to journalists,” Mr. Anson said, adding that Mr. Weinstein was also worried “that articles were being written about him that discussed his sexual life in a negative way.”
Mr. Anson never undertook an investigation.
Mr. Weinstein was once a Hollywood giant, a feared executive who reshaped the independent movie industry with Oscar winners like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction,” and who was a big donor to former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats.
The indictment charges Mr. Weinstein with sexually assaulting two women: Mimi Haleyi, who was a production assistant on his show “Project Runway,” and a hairstylist and aspiring actress from Washington State, whom The Times is not naming because she is an alleged rape victim.
Mr. Weinstein is accused of forcing oral sex on Ms. Haleyi in his TriBeCa apartment in 2006 and raping the aspiring actress at a Doubletree Hotel in Midtown Manhattan in 2013.
Ms. Sciorra was called by prosecutors to bolster the charge of predatory sexual assault. The five-year time limit for filing a separate rape charge in the attack she described has long passed.
Justice James A. Burke is permitting three other women to testify about their allegations that Mr. Weinstein attacked them, even though he is not charged with crimes in those cases.
Prosecutors hope to use their testimony to establish that Mr. Weinstein has a longstanding pattern of preying on women. A similar trial tactic helped lead to a conviction of Bill Cosby on a sexual assault charge in Pennsylvania.
Earlier on Friday, Dr. Barbara Ziv, a forensic psychiatrist who provided expert testimony in Mr. Cosby’s second trial, explained to jurors in the Weinstein case why a woman might remain in contact with her attacker after an assault.
During opening statements, a defense lawyer told the jury that Ms. Haleyi and the aspiring actress from Washington State had stayed in touch with Mr. Weinstein for years after the alleged assaults. They have pointed to friendly emails the women exchanged with Mr. Weinstein as evidence that the sexual encounters were consensual.
But Dr. Ziv said it is common for sexual assault victims to stay in contact with their attackers if they know or work with them. One reason, she said, is a strong desire to move past the incident. Some victims also want to avoid hurting their jobs or reputations.
Sometimes, she added, the attacker will threaten the victim into silence.
“There’s always a worry on the part of the victim that a perpetrator can invade other aspects of their life and ruin their life,” she said.