‘I Just Lay There Like a Dead Fish’: Woman Accuses Harvey Weinstein of Forcing Himself on Her, Claims She Was ‘Mortified,’ at Rape Retrial

One of three women accusing Harvey Weinstein of sexual offenses may face a withering cross-examination on Thursday, after she gave emotional, tearful testimony on Wednesday for the defense in the disgraced producer’s rape retrial. From the witness stand, Miriiam Haley described how Mr. Weinstein, she claimed, forcibly performed an oral sex act on her without her consent. Prosecutors did not finish their direct examination on Wednesday because their questioning was constantly interrupted by objections from the defense, who asked twice for a mistrial. “I was telling him, I didn’t want this,” Ms. Haley, 48, told the jury at Manhattan criminal court as she described her first sexual encounter with Mr. Weinstein in 2006. “The unthinkable was happening. … I was also worried that he would be violent. … Is he gonna punch me in the face? So in the end I just decided to check out and just endure.” Ms. Haley, who was 29 years old in 2006 and is a Swedish citizen, had met Mr. Weinstein at an event in London, where she was living at the time. Another producer, whom she was assisting, had introduced them. She then saw Mr. Weinstein again at one of his favorite stomping grounds, the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France, and she asked him if he had any work for her. Mr. Weinstein, an Oscar-winning film producer who made prestige films like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction,” also produced a lower-quality reality TV show called “Project Runway,” which was being shot in New York. He hired Ms. Haley as a production assistant for a brief period of time. Former film producer Harvey Weinstein appears in court as his retrial continues at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 30, 2025, in New York City. Michael Nagle-Pool/Getty ImagesMs. Haley had told the jury on Tuesday that, by this time, she had rejected previous advances by Mr. Weinstein. He had lured her up to his hotel room in Cannes and asked her to give him a massage, a request she refused, and later, when they were both in New York, invited her — unsuccessfully — to join him on a trip to Paris in his private jet. After the “Project Runway” shoot had ended, Ms. Haley said Mr. Weinstein offered to fly her to Los Angeles to attend the film premiere of “Clerks 2,” a movie he had also produced. Ms. Haley accepted the offer and, the day before her scheduled flight, also accepted an invitation to his apartment in Soho, a wealthy neighborhood in downtown Manhattan. “It would have been odd to say no, since I was going to L.A.,” Ms. Haley testified. “I remember that it was light when I went there and darkish when I went out.” She described how Mr. Weinstein sent a driver to pick her up from her apartment in the East Village. The driver then “escorted me all the way upstairs to the apartment … where Harvey Weinstein greeted me.” Then, she remembered, the driver departed, leaving her alone with the film producer. Ms. Haley and Mr. Weinstein were sitting in the living room, talking, when he suddenly “lunged” at her and tried to kiss her. Former film producer Harvey Weinstein appears in court as his retrial continues at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 30, 2025, in New York City. Curtis Means-Pool/Getty Images“We were sitting on the sofa, talking. … Soon after that he lunged at me and tried to kiss me. … I rejected him and he kept persisting, trying to kiss me. … I got up off the sofa. … He also got up from the sofa.” Ms. Haley said. At the time, she weighed around 110 pounds, and Mr. Weinstein, according to photographs shown during the trial, must have weighed twice as much or more. “I was basically trying to push him away and he would persist to pull me towards him. … As I was walking away, he was grabbing me. … Pushing me with his body, so I was backed into that room, a dark bedroom.” Mr. Weinstein was sitting in the courtroom in his wheelchair, leaning forward, either taking notes or staring straight at the witness as she went on to detail the incident. “I was trying to get him off of me. … I was trying to make him stop. … He forced kissed me,” Ms. Hayley said and began to cry. She did not burst into tears, she was trying, so it seemed, to compose herself, but was unable to stop the emotion from overwhelming her. “He backed me. … Until I fell onto the bed. … And I am trying to get him off me. … And every time I tried to get up, he pushed me back onto the bed. … He just continued, he continued pushing, he continued insisting … he was holding me down with his weight and arms and hands and at my wrists and wherever I was moving at the time.” Former film producer Harvey Weinstein appears in court as his retrial continues at Manhattan Criminal Court on April 30, 2025, in New York City. Curtis Means-Pool/Getty ImagesMs. Haley testified that she told Mr. Weinstein that she was on her period, but that he didn’t care and removed her tampon.“And I told him that I was on my period. … I told him I had a tampon and to please stop. He asked me where it was and then found it and yanked it out.” She said the room was “very dark” and that he put his mouth on her vagina “forcefully.” “I was mortified. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was in disbelief. I was on my period. I was ungroomed. I didn’t want anyone to go there and certainly not him. … My brain was calculating what the best course of action was at that moment, taking into consideration whether I was able to get away from him. … And I decided at that moment that the safest thing to do was to check out, endure it, have it over with and leave.” The prosecution’s key witness, Jessica Mann, center, arrives at Manhattan criminal court to testify at the sex assault trial of Harvey Weinstein on January 31, 2020. David Dee Delgado/Getty Images“The next thing I remember is coming out of there,” Ms. Haley said. She took a taxi home and confided what had happened to her roommate and friend, Elizabeth Entin, who had testified at the trial last Thursday, as the Sun reported. She said she considered her options, and decided against reporting the incident to the police. “My thoughts were that this person was very powerful in the entertainment industry and I risked having both the industry and the media turn against me and call me various things,” she said. “I did kind of suppress it … I found a way to kind of almost suppress, put it away and carry on like it almost didn’t happen although it bugged me in the back of my mind forever.”Approximately two weeks later, Mr. Weinstein invited her to see him again, this time at the TriBeCa Grand Hotel in lower Manhattan. She testified that she went to the hotel “trying to gain some kind of control back” and “trying to navigate the whole situation in a way that would make me feel better about myself.” She also thought they would meet in the lobby. But she was told to go upstairs to his room. “So he opened the door and as soon as he opened the door, he took me by the hand and he led me by the arm and pulled me toward the bed,” Ms. Haley testified. As she spoke, Mr. Weinstein could be seen shaking his head at the defense table. Miriam Haley, center, an accuser testifying at Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial, arrives to the New York courtroom, April 29, 2025. AP/Seth Wenig“He pulled me over onto the bed. … And I was just like oh no, not again. … And he just proceeded to undress me. I literally, in that moment, I just felt so stupid and I kind of just went numb. He proceeded to have intercourse with me and I just lay there like a dead fish.” Ms. Haley admitted that she blamed herself, because she had gone up to the room and because she didn’t physically resist him. “I did blame myself that time, because i didn’t physically resist, because I was stupid enough to come and meet him again in that type of scenario. … He said things like, bitch, whore. I said I’m not a bitch, I am not a whore … I felt very small.” As she spoke about her experience, she cringed and teared up again. When asked by the prosecutor she said Mr. Weinstein had not used a condom, and told her not to worry that he could “not have kids.”Mr. Weinstein, now a divorcee, has five children with two different wives. This was the second time he was listening to Ms. Haley testimony in a courtroom. In 2020, during his first trial, the jury convicted him of rape in the third degree and of committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree, against Ms. Haley. The judge sentenced him to 23 years in prison. Elizabeth Entin, right, a witness in the Harvey Weinstein rape and sexual assault trial, walks toward the courtroom with Assistant District Attorney Meghan Hast, January 28, 2020, in New York. AP/Craig RuttleBut last year, New York’s highest court, the court of appeals, overturned his 2020 conviction and ordered a new trial. The court found that the trial judge had incorrectly permitted damaging testimony by women who were not part of the indictment and thus prejudiced the jury. Mr. Weinstein also faces a rape charge related to a claim from a former aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, who alleges she was raped by Mr. Weinstein in 2013 in a Manhattan hotel and also testified in 2020. And, he is facing a new charge in this trial. A former model and actress, Kaja Sokola, alleged that he forced oral sex on her in 2006. Mr. Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to all charges. On Wednesday, the defense team asked twice for a mistrial, after they had already requested a mistrial unsuccessfully last week. In the morning, before Ms. Haley was called to the witness stand to resume her testimony, the lead defense attorney, Arthur Aidala, told the judge that prosecutors had failed to turn over crucial evidence when they redacted intrinsic information from Ms. Haley’s personal calendar, which the prosecution was constantly using as evidence, for example, to show the jury that Ms. Haley had written the letter “P” into the day when she met Mr. Weinstein at his apartment, indicating, prosecutors claimed, that she was on her period. Mr. Aidala complained that the unredacted version of the organizer, which his team finally received on Tuesday night, showed the length of time that Ms. Haley was living in New York. Born in Finland and raised in Sweden, Ms. Haley had previously resided in London, and had come to New York for a limited amount of time on a tourist visa. Attorneys Diana Fabi Samson and Arthur Aidala speak outside Harvey Weinstein’s retrial in Manhattan criminal court, April 24, 2025, in New York. AP/Julia Demaree NikhinsonThe calendar also showed that Ms. Haley had had meetings with the Canadian-American producer Lorne Michaels, who created and produced “Saturday Night Live.” During a break, Mr. Aidala told the Sun that the calendar showed that Ms. Haley, “who always told us she had no money,” was also “getting facials all the time.” The presiding judge, Curtis Faber, denied the mistrial motion and told the defense that they could call witnesses, if needed. The third mistrial motion came when prosecutors asked Ms. Haley about staying in contact with Mr. Weinstein over the course of several years, citing emails she sent to him from 2009, even though she had experienced two alleged horrific sexual assaults. Ms. Haley told the jury that she “needed money” and was trying to get jobs in the film industry and pitching ideas for TV shows, and that she had “no idea there were other people,” meaning other alleged sexual assault victims. Former movie producer Harvey Weinstein talks to attorney Arthur Aidala as he appears at his retrial in Manhattan criminal court on April 23, 2025, in New York City. Steven Hirsch-Pool/Getty ImagesMr. Aidala asked the judge to strike the comment from the record, saying that Ms. Haley had “contaminated the whole jury.” The judge struck the statement, but denied the mistrial motion, arguing that Ms. Haley was expected to testify about the moment in 2017 when numerous women came forward and accused Mr. Weinstein of sexual offenses. “It’s going to come out,” Judge Farber told the defense. In another contentious moment that caused Mr. Aidala to jump up from his chair, an assistant district attorney, Nicole Blumberg, who was questioning Ms. Haley, pointed out that the defense team was using too many different attorneys to call out objections and make mistrial motions. “There’s not going to be one lawyer. This man’s life is on the line!” Mr. Aidala responded loudly, referring to his client, who faces a maximum of 25 years in prison on the top charge alone, which is the allegation brought by Ms. Haley. The trial will resume on Thursday.

‘I Just Lay There Like a Dead Fish’: Woman Accuses Harvey Weinstein of Forcing Himself on Her, Claims She Was ‘Mortified,’ at Rape Retrial

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