Annabella Sciorra Tells Jury Chilling Recollection Of Night Harvey Weinstein Raped Her – Deadline

Annabella Sciorra recounted to a jury how Harvey Weinstein burst into her apartment sometime in the winter of 1993-94, pinned her on a bed and raped her, leaving her so traumatized that she began to shake so much she thought she was having a seizure.

As Weinstein sat at the defense table, largely looking down writing on a legal pad, Sciorra recalled that she had tried to fend him off during the counter.

“I was punching him, kicking him,” she said, looking at a prosecutor and directly at the jury, her voice emotional and occasionally cracking. “I was just trying to get him away from me. He put my hands over my head to hold them back, and he got on top of me and he raped me. He put his penis inside my vagina and he raped me.”

Raising her arms in the air, she showed how she said Weinstein, on top of her, put her hands over her head, and she was unable to fight him off “because he had my hands locked.”

“At a certain point, he came out of me,” Sciorra said. 

Asked by prosecutor Joan Illuzi what Weinstein did next, Sciorra recalled, “He said I have perfect timing.”

She said that then Weinstein “proceeded to put his mouth on my vagina, and before he did that, he said, ‘This is for you.’ I didn’t have much fight left inside of me at that point. I said, ‘No, No.’ There was not much I could do.” She said that at that point, “my body shut down. It was so disgusting that my body started to shake in a way that was very unusual. It was like a seizure.”

She said that after he left, she is not sure if she “fainted or fell asleep or blacked out.”

“I don’t remember the immediate reaction when I woke up,” Sciorra said. “I don’t remember much except for feeling disgusting.”

She did not report the assault to the police. She said that at the time, she didn’t know what constituted the crime of rape, thinking it had to do with sexual assaults in back alleyways and at gunpoint. In this case, she knew Weinstein, having already done a film project for Miramax.

“I felt like he was a nice person. I thought he was an OK guy. I felt confused. I felt like i never should have opened the door,” she said.

She did call her brothers to come over, but they did not. “I wanted them to come over to protect me,” she said, crying. Her brother’s girlfriend came over, but she did not tell her, nor did she tell her brothers or friends.

She started retreating from her friends, secluding herself in her apartment. She began drinking and cutting herself, and started to paint a room from white to blood red with tubes of oil paint. 

“I began to cut myself,” she said. “I would put blood from my fingers and my hands into this masterpiece. Wherever I put blood, I would put pieces of gold leaf to mark it.”

She said that when she later saw Weinstein, she brought up what happened.

“I told him how I had woken up and I told him how I blacked out and fainted, and he said, ‘That is what all the nice Catholic girls say.’” She said he also told her, “This remains between you and me.”

“It was very menacing,” Sciorra said. “His eyes went black, and I thought he was going to hit me right there.”

Sciorra said that the night of the assault, he had given her a ride home from a Miramax dinner at a Manhattan restaurant to her Gramercy Park apartment (others at the dinner included actress Uma Thurman). She said that their conversation on the ride was uneventful, and that he just dropped her off and she went up to her unit.

When she got dressed for bed in a nightgown, she heard a knock on the door. Even though her building had a doorman, she answered and he was there.

He pushed the door, and she said that she “didn’t have time to understand why he was there.” He started to “sort of walk around” and Weinstein began to unbutton his shirt.

“Then I realized he thought we were going to be having sex,” she said, adding that she made clear she was not interested, and “I told him he had to leave.”

Sciorra was the first accuser to take the stand in Weinstein’s sexual assault trial. Her allegations are too old to prosecute on their own, but she is a part of the prosecution’s case as they pursue charges that Weinstein was a serial predator.

Weinstein, 67, faces five charges of sexual assault stemming from allegations by two women, Jessica Mann and Miriam Haleyi, related to incidents in 2006 and 2013. They also are expected to testify. Weinstein has insisted that all the sexual encounters were consensual. If convicted, he could face life in prison.

As Sciorra testified, Weinstein only occasionally looked toward her, instead focusing on taking notes. His view of the witness box was somewhat obstructed by the judge’s desk. But when she was asked to identify the defendant, Sciorra stood up from the witness box to peer over and point at him. He looked directly at her as she was asked to describe what he was wearing — a black suit and white shirt.

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