‘The unthinkable was happening,’ Weinstein accuser says of alleged sex assault
The 73-year-old former studio boss has pleaded not guilty and denies sexually assaulting anyone.
A former TV production assistant told a jury that Harvey Weinstein held her down on a bed and forced oral sex on her after she told him: “No, no — it’s not going to happen.”
Dabbing her eyes as she gave evidence on Wednesday, Miriam Haley recalled what ran through her mind during the alleged July 2006 assault: “The unthinkable was happening, I just thought any unthinkable thing could happen. I just didn’t know where it ended.”
Weinstein, sitting between his lawyers, shook his head as she spoke.
Haley, who has also gone by the name Mimi Haleyi, is the first of the former Hollywood honcho’s accusers to testify at his rape retrial.
It is happening because New York’s highest court overturned Weinstein’s 2020 conviction.
The 73-year-old former studio boss has pleaded not guilty and denies sexually assaulting anyone.
Ms Haley, 48, testified at the original trial and was candid last year about her ambivalence about repeating the experience.
Her demeanour on Wednesday was calm and matter-of-fact, if briefly tearful, as she answered prosecutors’ graphic questions about the alleged assault.
Ms Haley got to know Weinstein through a mutual connection. She worked on the Weinstein-produced reality show Project Runway in June 2006 and had a series of interactions with him that were sometimes inappropriate and suggestive, but other times professional and polite, she told jurors.
She insisted said she was only looking for professional opportunity — not sex or romance — with the then-powerful producer of such Oscar winners as Shakespeare in Love and Gangs of New York.
Ms Haley said she accepted an invitation to visit Weinstein’s Manhattan apartment one early evening because she felt it would have been odd to decline — she was due to fly on his company’s dime to Los Angeles the next day to see a premiere of the company’s film Clerks II.
Almost as soon as she and Weinstein sat down on his living room sofa, he lunged to kiss her, she testified.
She said she leapt up and rejected him, but he grabbed her and forcibly backed her into a bedroom.
Ms Haley said he then pinned her down on a bed and performed oral sex on her, ignoring her pleas that she didn’t want it.
After the alleged assault, she felt shocked, disgusted, humiliated and “trapped as to what to do about it,” she recalled.
The Finnish-born Ms Haley said she ultimately did not call police because she feared getting in immigration trouble for having worked on Project Runway while on a tourist visa.
Ms Haley and two of her friends testified that she soon told them, however, that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her.
A few weeks later, Ms Haley said, she agreed to meet Weinstein at a Manhattan hotel, expecting they’d talk in the lobby and hoping “to navigate the whole situation in a way that would make me feel better about myself and would have the most upside to me”.
When she was told instead to go to his room, she did, and let him steer her onto the bed for sex that she didn’t want but didn’t physically resist because she felt stupid for having agreed to meet him at all, she said.
Still, “I made it clear at all occasions when he made advances that I didn’t want to go there,” she said.
Over the next few months, Ms Haley asked Weinstein’s assistant for a plane ticket to London.
“I didn’t feel bad about it, after everything that had happened, especially,” she said.
Jurors were shown occasional reminders to “call HW” on Haley’s 2006 calendar. She said those calls were about jobs, projects or pitching ideas.
She testified that she stayed in touch because she was “desperate for work” and wanted to derive some professional benefit from knowing Weinstein.
His lawyers have not had their chance to question Ms Haley and potentially try to poke holes in her account.
The defence has argued that all of Weinstein’s accusers consented to sexual encounters with him in hopes of getting work in show business.
Weinstein’s retrial includes charges based on allegations from Ms Haley and another accuser from the original trial, Jessica Mann, who was once an aspiring actor. She alleges that Weinstein raped her in 2013.
He is also being tried, for the first time, on an allegation of forcing oral sex on former model Kaja Sokola in 2006. Her claim was not part of the first trial.
Mann and Sokola are also expected to testify at some point.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who allege they have been sexually assaulted unless they give permission for their names to be used. Ms Haley, Ms Mann and Ms Sokola have done so.
