Harvey Weinstein trial: Woman tells court alleged rape made her ‘feel very guilty’ | Ents and art news

A woman who claims Harvey Weinstein raped her in 2013 has revealed she felt guilty and disgusted for years after she let him into her hotel room.

The woman, a model and actress who lives and works in Rome and was in Los Angeles at the time for a film festival, said she started drinking heavily the day after the alleged rape.

“I destroyed myself,” she said. “I felt very guilty. Most of all because he opened the door.”

The woman was the first of the eight Weinstein Prosecutors are set to testify in Los Angeles, where the 70-year-old movie mogul is on trial on multiple counts of rape and sexual assault.

Weinstein, who is already serving a 23-year sentence in New York, has pleaded not guilty.

While most of the women said their assaults began with what were supposed to be business meetings with Weinstein at hotels, a woman who testified Tuesday said she saw him knocking on her door late at night in February 2013. year.

She said she had only met him a short time earlier the night before at the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival and was staying at a hotel under an alias.

She said she had no idea how Weinstein even knew her room number, and that at first she let him through her door, thinking there was no harm in it, but Weinstein became sexually aggressive.

The woman, whose mother tongue is Russian, said her English was very poor at the time, although it has since improved a lot, and she thought she might have been speaking poorly.

“I felt guilty that I had done or said something to make him think something might happen between us,” she said.

She said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on a hotel bed.

“I was kind of hysterical through the tears,” she said. “I kept saying ‘no, no, no.’

She said she was physically afraid of Weinstein, who weighed 100 pounds or more on her, and considered running, hitting or biting him.

When Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson asked why she didn’t do it, she said, “I don’t know. I really regret it.”

She said that by the time Weinstein took her into the bathroom to rape her, she had stopped physically resisting, although she objected verbally.

“I would just freeze like my body wouldn’t obey,” she said.

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She said she found it difficult to see her children after the alleged rape and felt the need to confess to her Russian Orthodox priest. Prosecutors demanded that the priest testify, but he refused, citing religious privileges. The woman’s daughter, now 21, is due to testify at a later date.

In his opening statement, Weinstein’s attorney, Mark Werksman, said many of the charges against his client were actually consensual sex, which his accusers reframed after he became the focus of the #MeToo movement in 2017.

But in the case of the woman who testified on Tuesday, Mr. Werksman denied any events in her room at all.