The model had arrived in New York City in 2002 only a few days earlier. She had left her family in Poland and came across the world hoping to become a star.
Then she met Harvey Weinstein.
The model, Kaja Sokola, was 16 and Mr Weinstein was a 50-year-old producer when they met in a club and he received her telephone number, Mrs. Sokola told a jury in Manhattan on Thursday.
He invited her to have lunch to talk about her ambitions in films, she remembered. Instead, he took her to his apartment in Soho, where he forced her to masturbate in a bathroom while he touched her.
On Thursday, more than 20 years later, Mrs. Sokola told that day for the first time in court and sometimes broke in sobbing. Mr Weinstein sat at the defense table and listened with his head on his hand.
After that meeting, Mr Weinstein attacked her a number of times in the early 2000s, said Mrs. Sokola. The incident she described that she was a minor is too old to be the subject of criminal prosecution. But four years later, said Mrs. Sokola, she was in New York for work and during an afternoon meeting with Mr Weinstein and her older sister when he brought her to a hotel room and sexually abused her.
That incident is part of a criminal case against Mr Weinstein who is heard in a new process that started last month. Mr Weinstein is accused of committing one criminal sexual act in the first degree Against Mrs. Sokola, one of three women who say public prosecutors that he has attacked.
In 2020, Mr Weinstein, 73, was convicted of sexual crimes in New York and sentenced to 23 years in prison. But the highest court of the state last year the decision destroyed. The judges discovered that prosecutors should not be allowed to call as witnesses who said Mr Weinstein had attacked them, but whose accusations were not the basis for any charges.
Mr Weinstein has argued not guilty of the new set of charges and his lawyers insist that his interactions with the women were consensual. He was convicted of similar charges in California and sentenced to 16 years in prison there. He appeals to that case.
Mr Weinstein has confronted years of legal problems after accusations against him have set up the global #MeToo movement. The man behind “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love” was known to make the career of Hollywood stars. He also used his power to bother and sexually mistreated women of whom many of them were young and tried to get it in the industryAccording to dozens of women who came forward.
Prosecutors claim that Mr Weinstein used his influence to exert ‘enormous control’ and not only to make sexual abuse of Mrs. Sokola, but also Jessica MannAn aspiring actress who said Mr Weinstein attacked her in 2013, and Miriam HaleyA former television production assistant who said he attacked her in 2006. Mrs. Haley took the position Against Mr. Weinstein last week.
Like Mrs. Haley, Mrs. Sokola had met Mr Weinstein while she was looking for work in New York and thought the producer could open doors.
In the spring of 2006, just before Mrs. Sokola’s 20th birthday, Mr Weinstein met her and her sister around lunch, she said. He had just helped her to get a role as an extra in the film ‘The Nanny Diaries’, of which she thought it could mean a ‘change of pattern’ for Mr Weinstein. She thought he might see her really potential, she said. And if Mr Weinstein believed in her, her mother and sister, who came down to her acting ambitions, might take her seriously, she told the jury.
After about half an hour of conversation, Mr Weinstein asked Mrs. Sokola to accompany him to a hotel room so that she could look at a script, she said. There, she said, he forced her to oral sex.
The older sister of Mrs. Sokola, Ewa Sokola, testified on Wednesday that her sister returned to the table after about half an hour, “acting tense”. She added that her attitude was like someone who is anxiously waiting for the results of a school exam.
“I asked her about what happened, and she said everything was fine,” said Ewa Sokola.
Kaja Sokola called no attack and the couple normally went on, her sister said. About cross -hearing by Mr Weinstein’s lawyer, Michael Cibella, Ewa Sokola said she knew nothing about her sister’s allegations to Mr. Weinstein until she saw one Rolling Stone article about them in 2022. She was ‘shocked’, she said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
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