Harvey Weinstein trial: The full allegations against him
Producer is accused of raping a woman in 2013 and performing a forcible sex act on another woman in 2006
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Your support makes all the difference.Six women out of the many who have come forward against Harvey Weinstein have testified over the last two weeks at his criminal trial.
Their accounts are at the heart of the prosecution’s case against the former film mogul, who could spend the rest of his life behind bars if convicted on the most serious charges against him.
Weinstein is accused of raping a woman in 2013 and performing a forcible sex act on another woman in 2006. He has pleaded not guilty and has denied all allegations of non-consensual sex.
The women whose claims are at the centre of the case have both testified.
Others were called to the witness stand under a state law allowing testimony about so-called “prior bad acts”, as prosecutors worked to portray an alleged pattern of predatory behaviour on Weinstein’s part.
Among those who testified is the woman who alleges that Weinstein raped her in 2013. The woman, 34, claims that he trapped her in a Manhattan hotel room, angrily ordered her to undress as he loomed over her, and then raped her before they were to meet her friends for breakfast on the eve of his 61st birthday.
She alleges that Weinstein raped her again several months later at a hotel in Beverly Hills, California.
The woman testified for three days, more than any other accuser, and broke down crying in the middle of an exhaustive cross-examination. Why, the defence asked, did the woman maintain a relationship with Weinstein — one that included consensual sexual encounters — for an extended period of time after she says she was raped?
After the woman lost her composure, and was heard screaming in a side room, the judge sent jurors home for the day. When she returned to the stand, she said her relationship with Weinstein was complex, but defiantly declared: “He is my rapist.”
Also among the witnesses is Mimi Haleyi, who alleges that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her at his SoHo apartment.
“I was kicking, I was pushing, I was trying to get away from his grip,” she testified. “He held me down and kept pushing me down to the bed.” She told jurors she thought she was being raped and wondered, “If I scream rape, will someone hear me?”
Haleyi said she and Weinstein had sex at a hotel two weeks later. She said she didn’t want to be intimate, but didn’t think Weinstein forced her to have sex. Weinstein’s lawyers have suggested that episode is evidence he didn’t coerce her during the first encounter, either.
Haleyi also alleges that Weinstein asked her to give him a massage in May 2006 at the Cannes Film Festival. She said he also insisted she go with him to the Paris fashion shows, which she repeatedly declined.
Sopranos actor Annabella Sciorra was the first accuser to testify in the trial.
Prosecutors allege that before Weinstein assaulted Haleyi in 2006 and raped the woman in his hotel room in 2013, he raped actress Annabella Sciorra in late 1993 or early 1994 — a claim that is too old to be the basis for criminal charges on its own.
In a quivering voice, Sciorra told the jury that Weinstein allegedly barged into her apartment after they attended a dinner with other industry figures, threw her on a bed and forced himself on her as she futilely kicked and punched him.
She said that about a month later, she ran into him and confronted him. She said he replied, “that’s what all the nice Catholic girls say” and then leaned towards her and added menacingly: “This remains between you and I.”
A judge allowed prosecutors to introduce testimony from three women as part of an effort to show that Weinstein allegedly used the same basic pattern to get women alone and then asssault them.
Tarale Wulff testified that Weinstein allegedly raped her at his SoHo apartment between May 2005 and July 2005 after luring her there with a ruse of reading a script for a movie.
She said she froze as he allegedly attacked her, thinking that would make it “easier to get through, to get past it.” Wulff also claimed that before the alleged rape, he accosted her at a night club where she was waitressing, led her to a hallway and started masturbating. Weinstein is not charged with a crime related to Wulff.
Dawn Dunning, also called as a witness to testify about Weinstein’s alleged pattern of behaviour with women, told jurors that he put his hand up her skirt and fondled her genitals during what was supposed to be a meeting about her fledgling career in his hotel suite in 2004, when she was 23.
She alleges that he later tried trading movie roles for three-way sex with him and his assistant. Dunning said that when she laughed off that proposition, Weinstein told her, “you’ll never make it in this business, this is how this industry works.”
Lauren Marie Young was the last accuser take the witness stand. She testified that Weinstein allegedly stripped naked, groped her breast, and masturbated in the bathroom of his Beverly Hills hotel room days before the Oscars in February 2013.
Her allegations are the subject of a criminal charge filed against Weinstein in California on 6 January, just as his New York trial was getting underway. He isn’t charged in New York in connection with his alleged dealings with Young.
The Associated Press contributed to this report