Harvey Weinstein trial: Woman tells court alleged rape left her ‘feeling very guilty’
A woman who alleges Harvey Weinstein raped her in 2013 has testified she felt guilt and disgust for years after she let him into her hotel room.
The woman, a model and actress living and working in Rome who was in Los Angeles at the time for a film festival, said she began drinking heavily the day after the alleged rape.
“I was destroying myself,” she said. “I was feeling very guilty. Most of all because I opened that door.”
The woman was the first of eight Weinstein accusers set to testify in Los Angeles, where the 70-year-old movie mogul is on trial for multiple counts of rape and sexual assault.
Weinstein, who is already serving a 23-year sentence for a conviction in New York, has pleaded not guilty.
While most of the women have said their assaults began with what were supposed to be business meetings with Weinstein at hotels, the woman who testified on Tuesday said she found him knocking on her door late at night in February 2013.
She said she had met him only briefly earlier in the evening at the Los Angeles Italia film festival and was staying in the hotel under a pseudonym.
She said she had no idea how Weinstein even knew her room number and that she let him through her door initially without thinking there was any harm in it but Weinstein became sexually aggressive.
The woman, whose first language is Russian, said her English was very poor at the time, though it has improved considerably since, and she thought she might have miscommunicated.
“I was feeling guilty that I did something or said something that made him think something could happen between us,” she said.
Weinstein in court earlier this month. Pic: AP
She said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on her hotel bed.
“I was kind of hysterical through tears,” she said. “I kept saying ‘no, no, no’.”
She said she physically feared Weinstein, who outweighed her by 100 pounds or more and considered running or hitting or biting him.
When deputy district attorney Paul Thompson asked why she did not, she answered: “I don’t know. I regret this a lot.”
She said by the time Weinstein took her into the bathroom to rape her, she had stopped physically resisting, though still objected verbally.
“I would just freeze, like my body wouldn’t listen,” she said.
Read more:
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Harvey Weinstein: The fall of the king of Hollywood
She said she struggled to face her children after the alleged rape and felt the need to confess to her Russian Orthodox priest. Prosecutors sought the priest to testify but he declined, citing religious privilege. The woman’s daughter, now 21, is set to testify later.
In his opening statement, Weinstein’s attorney Mark Werksman said many of the counts his client is charged with were actually consensual sex his accusers reframed after he became a focus of the #MeToo movement in 2017.
But in the case of the woman who testified on Tuesday, Mr Werksman denied the events in her room happened at all.
Taylor Swift has revealed the release date for her new album, The Life Of A Showgirl.
The pop megastar announced her 12th studio album earlier this week but didn’t give many details.
Now, in social media posts and an appearance on boyfriend Travis Kelce’s sports podcast, Swift revealed just what fans can expect from the new album.
Taylor Swift and boyfriend Travis Kelce on the New Heights podcast. Pic: New Heights
The Life of Showgirl, written during the European leg of her record-breaking Eras tour, will be released on 3 October.
It consists of 12 songs, including the title track that features pop star Sabrina Carpenter.
The full track list is:
1. The Fate Of Ophelia
2. Elizabeth Taylor
3. Opalite
4. Father Figure
5. Eldest Daughter
6. Ruin The Friendship
7. Actually Romantic
8. Wi$h Li$t
9. Wood
10. Cancelled!
11. Honey
12. The Life Of A Showgirl (featuring Sabrina Carpenter)
Long-time collaborators Max Martin and Shellback, two Swedish producers who worked with Swift on some of her biggest hits, joined the pop star for this album.
Within four hours of posting the full podcast episode on YouTube, it had already gathered 4.7m views.
The cover of Taylor Swift’s newly announced album. Pic: Republic Records
The back cover of Taylor Swift’s 12th studio album The Life Of A Showgirl. Pic: Republic Records
‘The hardest-working star in pop’
The album follows last year’s The Tortured Poets Department, which was released during the Eras tour.
That tour, with shows on five continents and in 51 cities, raked in more than $2.2bn (£1.62bn) and was the highest-grossing tour of all time.
Read more about Taylor Swift:
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“This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” Swift said during her podcast appearance.
Sky News culture and entertainment reporter Gemma Peplow said after her globe-trotting tour and a swathe of re-releases over recent years, the new album cemented Swift’s reputation “as the hardest-working star in pop”.
Disgraced US film producer Harvey Weinstein is to be tried for a third time in a sexual assault case.
A jury in New York could not reach a verdict in June against the 73-year-old who was accused of raping actress Jessica Mann, and a mistrial was declared.
Judge Curtis Farber has said he wants the new trial to happen before the end of this year.
The same jury found Weinstein guilty in June of sexually assaulting former Project Runway production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006 and not guilty of assaulting Polish former runway model Kaja Sokola the same year.
Weinstein will be sentenced for the guilty verdict in Ms Haley’s case on 30 September.
He denied all of the charges. Throughout the retrial, his lawyers insisted the sexual encounters with his three accusers were “transactional” and “consensual,” and labelled the women as opportunists.
Weinstein was originally convicted of rape and criminal sexual act by the same court in 2020 and sentenced to 23 years in prison for the crimes.
Last year, however, New York’s highest court overturned the conviction, prompting Weinstein’s retrial this summer.
Weinstein was once one of the most powerful people in Hollywood – the co-founder of film and television production companies Miramax and The Weinstein Company, who produced films such as the Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love, Pulp Fiction, and The Crying Game.
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In 2017, a series of sexual misconduct allegations against him propelled the #MeToo movement.
Some of those accusations later led to criminal charges and his convictions in New York and California.
Before the retrial, Weinstein was also serving a 16-year prison sentence after being found guilty of rape in California in December 2022. He has also denied this charge.
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