Harvey Weinstein Assaulted Model When She Was 16, Jury Told (1)

Polish model Kaja Sokola told jurors on Thursday that Harvey Weinstein grabbed her genitals when she was 16 while she told him she “didn’t want to do this.”

“It was the most horrifying thing I’d ever experienced,” Sokola said through tears on the witness stand as she described a relationship with Weinstein that began at 16 and lasted years. She said Weinstein grabbed her vagina at a Manhattan apartment in 2002 and put her hand on his penis even though she’d told him she was 16.

When she said she wanted to leave, “he got upset and said I had to work on my stubbornness,” she said. “He said he’d made the careers of Penelope Cruz and Gwyneth Paltrow and I had to listen to him if I wanted to proceed in this career.”

Weinstein, sitting in a wheelchair feet away in the courtroom, repeatedly shook his head back and forth during Sokola’s testimony, holding his face in one hand.

Sokola is the only one at the trial so far who has accused Weinstein of assaulting an underage person. The claim from Sokola, who didn’t testify in Weinstein’s first trial, doesn’t form the basis of a charge against Weinstein at his retrial. Her 2002 claim is outside the statute of limitations, her lawyer has said.

Judge Curtis Farber instructed jurors that the testimony couldn’t be used for them to consider whether Weinstein had a “propensity or predisposition to the crimes in this case” but was “background information on the relationship between the parties.”

Sokola testified to an additional claim Thursday afternoon that Weinstein assaulted her in 2006, when she was 19, that is charged as a crime at the retrial. The disgraced movie producer told her he wanted to discuss a script at a Tribeca hotel room, she said. Once they were there, he pinned her down on a bed and forced oral sex on her, Sokola said.

“I kept on saying, ‘Please stop,’' Sokola testified, but Weinstein continued and she couldn’t push him off, she said.

“I felt like I was dead. They say hope dies last. I think my hope died, that I could get out of there, that this isn’t happening,” Sokola said.

Weinstein is being tried again in Manhattan Supreme Court on sex crime charges after his earlier conviction and 23-year sentence was overturned on appeal. The 2020 guilty verdict was a victory for the #MeToo movement, and activists are eyeing the retrial partly as an indicator of how much the climate has changed.

Key Government Witness

Sokola, the lone accuser expected to take the stand at the retrial who didn’t testify at the first, is a key government witness.

New York’s highest court last year said Weinstein’s trial improperly included testimony from women accusing him of sexual misconduct that wasn’t charged, prejudicing the jury. The decision effectively barred the state from bringing back women who’d accused Weinstein of assault at the 2020 trial, except for two whose claims were charged by prosecutors.

The government charged Weinstein with Sokola’s allegation after that ruling, adding her as a third accuser to the retrial. Weinstein’s defense team unsuccessfully fought her inclusion, saying the state was adding her to again improperly bolster the credibility of the other accusers.

Sokola said she met Weinstein in 2002 at then nightclub Butter in Manhattan when she was visiting New York from her native Poland for modeling work. Weinstein asked her if she was an actress and they exchanged numbers, she said.

“I was just thrilled that a film producer thinks I have potential,” she said. He later sent a driver to pick her up, she said. She thought they were going to a restaurant but instead went to an apartment where he took off his pants, she said.

“Before this I’d had a high school boyfriend, we’d kiss and hold hands, but I’d never been in a situation like this,” she said.

Weinstein has pleaded not guilty for a second time. His encounters with women were transactional but consensual, his attorney argued in opening statements.