Weinstein Accuser Annabella Sciorra Takes the Stand in His Trial
Weinstein Accuser Annabella Sciorra Takes the Stand in His Trial
(Bloomberg) -- Harvey Weinstein launched a campaign of increasingly menacing behavior toward “Sopranos” star Annabella Sciorra, starting with a series of creepy gifts delivered to her home and ending with her rape one winter night in the early 1990s, she told a rapt courtroom in Manhattan on Thursday.
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 initially resisted the role out of exhaustion, she testified. 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 actor is the first of several women whom prosecutors plan to question to show a pattern of predatory behavior in New York’s sexual assault case against Weinstein. The alleged attack occurred too long ago for the state to bring criminal charges. Instead, 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 in her Gramercy Park home.
She told the jury Weinstein dropped her off after a dinner that included rising stars such as Uma Thurman. She said she was in a nightgown and ready for bed by 10 p.m. when there was a knock at the door. She was surprised to see Weinstein there, she testified. She said he pushed his way in and began circling her, perhaps checking to see if there was anyone else in the apartment, then started unbuttoning his shirt and pushing her into the bedroom as she tried to escape to the bathroom.
“I realize 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,” she said. Then, she told the panel, grasping the front of her dress to demonstrate, “he grabbed me.” She said he pulled her into the bedroom and shoved her onto the bed.
“I was punching him, kicking him, trying to get him off me,” Sciorra testified. “He took my hands, and he put my hands over my head,” she said, raising her arms to show them pinned. She said she weighed just over 100 pounds, while Weinstein was more than twice as large.
At the end, Sciorra said, Weinstein ejaculated on her leg and told her, “I have perfect timing.”
At an industry event about two weeks after the alleged attack, 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 into me and said, ‘This remains between you and I.’ It was very menacing, and his eyes went black and I thought he was going to hit me right there.’”
Sciorra spent more than five hours on the stand Thursday, questioned by the prosecution and defense in a series of alternating rounds.
At one point defense lawyer Donna Rotunno showed jurors an excerpt of an August 1997 appearance Sciorra made on David Letterman’s late-night show while promoting a movie. In the excerpt, Letterman asks her about lying to the press about her father raising iguanas for the circus as a child.
“I have a bad reputation,” a smiling Sciorra tells Letterman. “I was caught in the last few years lying about quite a few things.”
“Why, when you’re spinning these yarns, do you expect people to say you’re kidding?” Letterman asks.
“You would think so, if they were intelligent,” Sciorra says.
“How do we know you’re not lying tonight?” Letterman asks.
“You don’t,” Sciorra parries.
On Thursday morning, as she was about to enter the courtroom, Sciorra looked up to the ceiling, then walked in steadily and appeared to glance at Weinstein as she passed the defense table. Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi asked her if she could identify Weinstein.
Sciorra turned to the defense table, stood up and pointed him out.
During opening statements Wednesday, Assistant District Attorney Meghan Hast had told the jury Sciorra waited for decades before reporting the attack, for fear of retribution.
“She knew this man,” Hast said. “He was already, by the ’90s, an imposing figure in the entertainment industry. What to do? She barricaded herself in her apartment, and she called her brother, but didn’t have the courage to tell him what happened. She was scared.”
Hast said Sciorra “thought if she could ignore it, she could convince herself it never happened, and maybe, just maybe, she could go on. Despite her efforts, Annabella was not successful.”
Prosecutors hope Sciorra, as the first of the producer’s alleged victims, will provide insight into Weinstein’s approach to the women who came into his orbit over the years. They say he preyed on them and then used his power in Hollywood to keep them silent for decades.
Sciorra says Weinstein stalked her for years. At a film festival, Hast told the jury Wednesday, he showed up outside her hotel room in his underwear, holding a bottle of baby oil and a video.
The case is People v. Weinstein, 450293/2018, New York State Supreme Court (Manhattan).
To contact the reporter on this story: Patricia Hurtado in Federal Court in Manhattan at pathurtado@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey
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