A lady who alleges Harvey Weinstein raped her in 2013 has testified she felt guilt and disgust for years after she let him into her resort room.
The girl, a mannequin and actress residing and dealing in Rome who was in Los Angeles on the time for a movie pageant, stated she started consuming closely the day after the alleged rape.
“I was destroying myself,” she stated. “I was feeling very guilty. Most of all because I opened that door.”
The girl was the primary of eight Weinstein accusers set to testify in Los Angeles, the place the 70-year-old film mogul is on trial for a number of counts of rape and sexual assault.
Weinstein, who’s already serving a 23-year sentence for a conviction in New York, has pleaded not responsible.
While many of the girls have stated their assaults started with what have been imagined to be enterprise conferences with Weinstein at motels, the girl who testified on Tuesday stated she discovered him knocking on her door late at night time in February 2013.
She stated she had met him solely briefly earlier within the night on the Los Angeles Italia movie pageant and was staying within the resort beneath a pseudonym.
She stated she had no concept how Weinstein even knew her room quantity and that she let him by means of her door initially with out pondering there was any hurt in it however Weinstein turned sexually aggressive.
The girl, whose first language is Russian, stated her English was very poor on the time, although it has improved significantly since, and she or he thought she might need miscommunicated.
“I was feeling guilty that I did something or said something that made him think something could happen between us,” she stated.
She stated Weinstein pressured her to carry out oral intercourse on her resort mattress.
“I was kind of hysterical through tears,” she stated. “I kept saying ‘no, no, no’.”
She stated she bodily feared Weinstein, who outweighed her by 100 kilos or extra and thought of operating or hitting or biting him.
When deputy district legal professional Paul Thompson requested why she didn’t, she answered: “I don’t know. I regret this a lot.”
She stated by the point Weinstein took her into the lavatory to rape her, she had stopped bodily resisting, although nonetheless objected verbally.
“I would just freeze, like my body wouldn’t listen,” she stated.
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She stated she struggled to face her youngsters after the alleged rape and felt the necessity to confess to her Russian Orthodox priest. Prosecutors sought the priest to testify however he declined, citing non secular privilege. The girl’s daughter, now 21, is ready to testify later.
In his opening assertion, Weinstein’s legal professional Mark Werksman stated most of the counts his consumer is charged with have been truly consensual intercourse his accusers reframed after he turned a spotlight of the #MeToo motion in 2017.
But within the case of the girl who testified on Tuesday, Mr Werksman denied the occasions in her room occurred in any respect.
Source: information.sky.com”