A woman who pitched a script to former film producer Harvey Weinstein testified Monday that he took off his clothes and got in a hotel room shower, then blocked her from leaving, groped her breast and committed a sex act in front of her nearly a decade ago.
In her second day on the stand, the woman identified in court only as “Jane Doe #2” told the downtown Los Angeles jury hearing the case against Weinstein that she followed him and a female mutual acquaintance to the hotel room at the Montage in Beverly Hills and that she was left behind with Weinstein in the bathroom in February 2013.
“I just couldn’t believe that she would do that to me — to another girl — because there’s a girl code. You don’t do that,” she said.
The woman testified that she was “disgusted” when Weinstein turned on the shower and quickly got out of his clothes.
“I had never seen someone that big naked so I just couldn’t fathom what was even happening to me right now,” she said. “He was just talking about the business and other actresses and saying, `This is what they do. This is how I know you can act.’
“I kept saying, “No, no, no.’ He just ignored what I said,” the woman told jurors.
She said she repeated “No, no, no, no,” after he emerged from the shower, and that he unzipped the back of her dress and pulled it down as he grabbed her right breast and masturbated. She said she was able to use her hands “like a shield on top of myself” to cover her vagina as he tried to touch it, and that “he went back to groping my right breast even harder.”
“I was really grossed out by his body and the look he was giving me,” she said, adding that she was concerned how she was going to get out of the hotel room safely. “I couldn’t move. I was frozen. I was so scared.”
When Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson asked what she was scared of, she responded, “I was scared of Harvey Weinstein … that he would hurt me or send someone to hurt me or ruin my career or make my life hell.”
She testified that she sat in her car and cried afterward and didn’t know whether to call police to report what had happened because she worried he “might have an in with the cops” and instead spoke with two of her friends.
The woman — a model-actress at the time — said she went to a meeting the following day at the Weinstein Co. involving job offers because she was “scared to not go to the meeting” out of fear of retaliation that could involve her agency being called and told to drop her.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Alan Jackson, the woman acknowledged that she had initially told police that she believed the alleged assault had occurred days or a few weeks after her initial meeting with one of Weinstein’s employees in 2012 while she now believes that it was about a year later.
“You felt that you were locked in there, but you were not locked in there. You felt that you were being sexually assaulted, but you were not,” Jackson suggested.
“I was definitely sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein,” she said, maintaining that she felt like she was trapped in the bathroom.
She said Weinstein was “definitely a monster” and feared that “he could have me killed” and that she “didn’t know what he was capable of.”
The woman testified that she sent an emailed response that she was accepting an invitation to a Weinstein party just days later, but said she never intended to go and was “afraid of retaliation so I acted like I wanted to go.”
She said she had blocked it out of her memory for so long before calling a hotline in 2017 or 2018 to report what had happened to her, and couldn’t initially say where it happened. She said she got to relive “my trauma” by walking through the hotel room and “felt everything flow back in” and was even given a moment to cry in the bathroom.
“At that point, other people were coming out and I felt safe to do so,” she testified of coming forward years after the alleged attack. “I wanted to prevent it from happening to anyone else.”
She acknowledged that she has been informed that the dress she wore that night was analyzed for DNA and that it tested negative for Weinstein’s DNA
The woman is one of three charged alleged “Jane Doe” victims who have gone before the jury.
The prosecutor said one of the other alleged victims who has yet to testify — Jane Doe #4 — is now married to California’s governor and showed a photo of Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, but said she was a “powerless actor trying to make her way in Hollywood” when she met Weinstein 17 years ago.
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, who was not referred to by name during the prosecutor’s opening statement, is expected to testify about the alleged attack in a hotel room at The Peninsula in Beverly Hills after initially meeting him at a film festival in Toronto in 2005.
“Jane Doe #4” reported that she was “crying and shaking” after Weinstein allegedly took her by the arm from a hotel room bathroom, pulled her onto the bed and told her, “Relax, this is going to make you feel better,” according to the prosecutor.
Weinstein began his entertainment career as a concert promoter and then, with his brother Bob, created Miramax Films, which produced a number of “iconic and award-winning films” including “Pulp Fiction,” “The English Patient,” “Good Will Hunting” and “Shakespeare In Love,” among others, the prosecutor noted.
The movies launched the careers of Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Quentin Tarantino and Gwyneth Paltrow, Thompson said.
One of Weinstein’s attorneys, Mark Werksman, countered that two of the victims named in the indictment “just made it up” and that it was “transactional sex” for the other two women.
“You will see that these were all consensual sexual relations or, in some cases, they didn’t happen at all,” Werksman told jurors in his opening statement. “Mr. Weinstein is an innocent man who is not guilty of the charges in this indictment.”
He told jurors that the allegations “can be traced directly to the #MeToo movement,” and said that his client “became the epicenter of the #MeToo movement.”
Werksman told the panel that Weinstein’s accusers were “women who willingly played the game by the rules applied back then” and now “claim they were raped and sexually assaulted.”
“He’s not Brad Pitt or George Clooney. He’s not hot,” Weinstein’s lawyer told jurors. “They had sex with him because he was powerful …”
Weinstein, he said, “was once a very successful movie producer” whose “name was synonymous with Oscars and hit movies” — but is now described as a “vile monster.”
Weinstein was extradited from New York, where he was convicted of raping an aspiring actress and of a criminal sex act against a former production assistant. The state’s highest court has since agreed to hear his appeal involving that case.
Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench — who described the charges as “essentially sexual assaults or assaults of a sexual nature” — told prospective jurors that the trial is expected to last about two months, including the jury selection process, which began Oct. 10.
Weinstein remains behind bars.