First Woman to Testify in Harvey Weinstein Trial Breaks Down on the Stand, Telling Jury She Was Afraid He Could Kill Her During Alleged Rape
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The first woman to testify in Harvey Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial broke down in tears, crying and breathing uncontrollably as she faced the jury to detail her sexual assault and rape allegations against the former Hollywood producer and already-convicted rapist.
The witness, known as Jane Doe #1, was the first to be called by the prosecution. The woman is a foreign actor, whose first language is not English. She speaks Russian, Italian and English, though her translator accompanied her in the courtroom and was utilized during her testimony.
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The woman claims she was assaulted by Weinstein in February 2013 when she was on a business trip in L.A. to attend the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival during Oscars weekend, as a celebrity guest of the festival’s founder, Pascal Vicedomini. As a popular model and TV host in Italy, Jane Doe #1 said she was required to walk red carpets at the festival, occupy VIP sections of the theater and attend exclusive industry dinner parties. At the time of the alleged incident, Jane Doe #1 had only met Weinstein briefly, and the two had “barely” spoken to each other, she said. She told the jury that after she had walked the red carpet and attended a festival event where Al Pacino and David O’Russell were guests of honor, she went back to her hotel, Mr. C Beverly Hills. Shortly after, Weinstein allegedly showed up unannounced to her hotel and forced his way into her room.
After returning to her hotel alone and undressing into a robe to get ready for bed, the hotel lobby called her room to say she had a guest, who was Weinstein. “I said I didn’t expect any guest,” Jane Doe #1 recalled to the jury. “I was confused… I didn’t understand what he was doing in the hotel.” She testified that she does not know how Weinstein knew her whereabouts or what hotel she was staying at, since she had only spoken a few words to him at the festival earlier in the night, and he was essentially a stranger, she explained.
She told the hotel staff that she could come downstairs, but Weinstein refused that offer. The next thing she knew, he was knocking on her door and loudly announcing himself. He said, “I want to talk to you.” Through tears, she told jurors that she opened the door so that he would stop knocking because the noise was so loud, she was embarrassed that other hotel guests might hear the commotion. “He just walked in,” she said. “I was really confused. I didn’t understand what was going on… I remember thinking, ‘Did he follow me?’ I don’t know him.”
The woman alleges that Weinstein forced himself into the hotel room and sat next to her on the bed. He took off his jacket and asked her to give him a massage. “I asked him to go,” she said, saying that Weinstein didn’t listen and instead moved closer to her. “When he came to the bed, he became a different person,” she testified. “I started to be more direct and ask him to go away.”
In an effort to get Weinstein to leave, she had told him that she was a mother of three and showed him photos of her children on her phone. She recalled asking him to leave repeatedly. “He became more physical,” she said when asked by prosecutor, deputy D.A. Paul Thompson, how Weinstein’s behavior changed, sharing that he tried to take off her robe. “He opened his pants, he [held] my hand and he was touching himself,” she said. “I was panicking and started crying … He didn’t care.”
Jane Doe #1 then alleged that Weinstein took off his pants. “I was terrified,” she testified. “I was afraid. He was treating my room as his home, and treating me not human… I was asking him please to leave.”
Crying and taking deep breaths on the stand, it appeared to be difficult for Jane Doe #1 to continue her testimony. When she was questioned further by the prosecutor, she went into gruesome detail of her allegations. “He had a problem with his erection,” she told the jurors, “And said to ‘suck him and suck his balls.'” She says Weinstein, only wearing his shirt, grabbed her hair and pulled her head towards his “private part.” She continued, “He forced me to do what he asked… I was crying, choking.”
Jane Doe #1’s testimony came after opening statements on Monday from the prosecution and defense. In their opening statement, Weinstein’s legal team told the jury that while Jane Doe #1 claims she was assaulted by Weinstein, she attended a party thrown by the Weinstein Company, years after the alleged incident and proudly posted a photo from the red carpet onto her own social media. When asked about this, she said that her PR manager had posted the photo without her approving the caption, which was par for the course in her business as a public figure.
On Tuesday, Jane Doe #1 continued her testimony, which lasted the entire day, ending in the middle of cross-examination by Weinstein’s attorney, Alan Jackson. “I want to apologize for my breakdown yesterday,” Jane Doe #1 said Tuesday morning, addressing the jury. “Unfortunately, I cannot control this.”
On her second day on the stand, Jane Doe #1 went into more detail on the alleged rape, recalling that after Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him on the hotel bed, he inserted his fingers into her vagina, as she tried to squirm away from him through tears. “He put my face into his testicles. I was trying to do what he asked me to do, but I was crying,” she said.
“His eyes changed. His behavior changed… I was physically afraid of him,” she said, estimating that Weinstein was 100 to 150 pounds heavier than her 120-pound stature at the time. “He was giving me orders… I was crying repeatedly, saying, ‘No, no, no, no.'”
She then testified that Weinstein brought her to the hotel bathroom, bent her over the sink, stood behind her, stared in the mirror and began to masturbate, before he raped her. He asked her to look in the mirror, she said.
“He put the fingers inside of me — my private part,” she said. “I was moving and didn’t let him. He held me and he tried to get inside of me with his penis, but I was moving and crying and I said no.” She recalls Weinstein saying “nasty” comments like, “‘C’mon, you’re not a little girl. Tell me you like it.'” She said she held her head down and he pulled her hair. “He asked me if I liked it and if I was wet,” she told the jurors. “I wanted to die. It was disgusting. It was humiliating.”
She told the prosecutor that she regrets not fighting back more. “I would just freeze,” she explained, adding that she was afraid he would “try to beat me or kill me.”
Jane Doe #1 told the jury that while she was “hysterical,” Weinstein was “getting upset” because he was having a problem getting an erection. “I think at that point, I gave up,” she said. “I wanted it to end.”
She immediately called her children’s nanny in Italy to tell her what had happened. She said she also told one of her close girlfriends in the days following the alleged incident, as well as her priest. “I confessed to my priest,” she said. “We’re a religious family.”
After the alleged rape, when she was still in L.A. for the festival, she unexpectedly saw Weinstein at an event where he presented an award to Quentin Tarantino. In the theater, Jane Doe #1 was seated near Tarantino and actor Christoph Waltz. She told the jury she was not aware Weinstein would be there, and she felt like she “can’t breath” when she saw him and did not interact with him.
She somberly told the jury that she had difficulty proceeding with her life after the alleged assault, but she tried to continue as normal, though there were “dark days.” She began drinking more than usual; some days she could not shower or brush her teeth. “Some of the days after what happened to me, I was destroying myself, punished myself,” she said. “I felt guilty… because I opened that door.”
In 2017, Jane Doe #1 was back at the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival, and unexpectedly saw Weinstein — again — at another business event. She said Weinstein sat near her at a festival dinner, which made her feel “out of her mind,” so she stood up and stepped outside on the balcony until Weinstein had left the restaurant. “I was afraid of him. I was afraid for my life. I was afraid for my kids. I was afraid for my reputation.”
Years later, when her teenage daughter had a problem of her own with a young man at school, Jane Doe #1 revealed to her daughter that she had been raped in her past, sharing that she understood what her daughter was going through. She told the jury that her daughter convinced her to file a police report. Ultimately, she went to the police to report the alleged incident with Weinstein in October 2017.
After Jane Doe #1’s grueling testimony, Weinstein’s attorney, Jackson, cross-examined her for over an hour on Tuesday afternoon. When court is back in session on Wednesday, that cross-examination will resume.
Editor’s note: This story has been edited and updated to include Jane Doe #1’s testimony on Tuesday, in addition to Monday.
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