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:
Everything you need to know about the Weinstein trial
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.
US
Democrat senator Chris Van Hollen who met wrongly deported man Kilmar Abrego Garcia says photos of pair with margaritas are staged
The Democrat senator who flew to meet the man wrongly deported to El Salvador has said photos of them with margaritas were staged by officials working for the country’s president.
Chris Van Hollen added that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported from the US last month, told him he has been moved from a notorious high-security prison in El Salvador to a detention centre with better conditions.
The deportation of Mr Garcia has become a flashpoint in the US, with Democrats casting it as a cruel consequence of Donald Trump’s disregard for the courts, while Republicans have criticised Democrats for defending him and argued his deportation is part of a larger effort to reduce crime.
Mr Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who was living in Maryland, is being detained in the Central American country despite the US Supreme Court calling on the White House to facilitate his return home.
Trump officials have said Mr Garcia has ties to the violent MS-13 gang. However, Mr Garcia’s attorneys say the government has provided no evidence, and he has never been charged with any crime related to such activity.
Mr Van Hollen flew to El Salvador and met with Mr Garcia this week in an effort to help secure his return to America.
Chris Van Hollen and Kilmar Abrego Garcia, seen in a photo shared by El Salvador’s president. Pic: Nayib Bukele on X
Van Hollen (right) says margaritas were later brought to the table. Pic: Press Office Senator Van Hollen/AP
Speaking to reporters at Washington Dulles International airport after returning to the US on Friday, Mr Van Hollen said: “As the federal courts have said, we need to bring Mr Abrego Garcia home to protect his constitutional rights to due process. And it’s also important that people understand this case is not just about one man.
“It’s about protecting the constitutional rights of everybody who resides in the United States of America.”
Mr Van Hollen added the Trump administration is “asserting a right to stash away residents of this country” in foreign prisons “without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order”.
The senator also revealed Mr Garcia was brought from a detention centre to his hotel after initial requests to meet or speak with him were denied.
Mr Van Hollen said Mr Garcia told him he was “traumatised” after being detained at El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison, but he had been moved to a “different facility” with better conditions nine days ago.
The senator said Mr Garcia told him he was worried about his family and that thinking about them was giving him “the strength to persevere” and to “keep going” under awful circumstances.
Mr Garcia’s wife, Jennifer, was at the news conference and wiped away tears as Mr Van Hollen spoke of her husband’s desire to speak to her.
Earlier, Mr Van Hollen had posted photos of himself meeting with Mr Garcia.
Chris Van Hollen speaks at Washington Dulles International Airport. Pic: AP
It came before El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele shared his own images of the meeting, which he claimed showed the pair “sipping margaritas” in the “tropical paradise of El Salvador”.
In an apparent sarcastic remark, Mr Bukele wrote that Mr Garcia had “miraculously risen” from the “death camps”.
Giving an account of what he says happened when the photos were taken, Mr Van Hollen said: “We just had glasses of water on the table. I think maybe some coffee.
“And as we were talking, one of the government people came over and deposited two other glasses on the table with ice. And I don’t know if it was salt or sugar round the top, but they looked like margaritas.
“If you look at the one they put in front of Kilmer, it actually had a little less liquid than the one in me in front of me to try to make it look, I assume like he drank out of it.
“Let me just be very clear. Neither of us touched the drinks that were in front of us.”
He added that people can tell he is telling the truth because if someone had sipped from one of the glass there would be a “gap” where the “salt or sugar” had disappeared.
Mr Van Hollen said the image shows the “lengths” the El Salvadorian president will go to “deceive people about what’s going on”.
“It also shows the lengths that the Trump administration and [President Trump] will go to, because when he was asked by a reporter about this, he just went along for the ride.”
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