One of the women, who accused the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein in his recent retrial of a criminal sexual act, Kaja Sokola, is being sued by her own sister – who also testified in the trial – for defamation at a Manhattan federal court.   

“This is an action for defamation, slander per se, libel per se and intentional infliction of emotional distress arising out of Defendant’s malicious, wrongful, provocative, and sensationalistic publications containing many false and contemptuous allegations,” the lawsuit begins, as first reported by the Associated Press.  

Filed at the Southern District of New York on December 23, the plaintiff, Ewa Sokola, a cardiologist based in Poland, (whose age is not known but she is estimated to be in her early fifties) claims statements made by her younger sister, the former Polish model, Kaja Sokola, 39, have resulted in “severe reputational and other damage,” such as the loss of patients, employees and overall credibility as a cardiologist in Poland. The amount that Ewa seeks is not specified, but “exceeds $75,000.” 

The lawsuit centers on an Instagram post on Kaja’s account and on various interviews Kaja gave after the retrial ended in June, where she accused Ewa of betrayal, of sleeping with a man who had proposed to Kaja, of stealing Kaja’s child’s passport, of stealing money from Kaja’s bank account, of falsifying medical documents, of having caused the death of a patient (a child), and effectively of committing perjury on the witness stand. 

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, that brought the charges against Weinstein, had called Ewa to testify during the retrial in the spring, but the witness ended up helping the defense, when she told the court about a journal her sister had kept back in Poland that listed all the men she claimed had sexually abused her. Ewa testified Weinstein was not on that list.  

The jury ultimately found Weinstein not guilty of the criminal sex act, forcibly performing oral sex on Kaja at a Manhattan hotel in 2006. But the jury rendered a split verdict on the three-count indictment. Weinstein was found guilty of committing a criminal sexual act on the former production assistant, Miriam Haley, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. He has not been sentenced yet.   

The judge declared a mistrial on the third count, a third-degree rape charge, brought by the former aspiring actress Jessica Mann, after the jury’s foreman refused to return to the deliberation room, where he claimed other jurors were pressuring him into voting against his will. Weinstein’s defense attorneys have alleged juror misconduct. The judge will address the matter at an upcoming hearing on January 8. 

Should Weinstein face another trial on Ms. Mann’s charge, and prosecutors have said they want to try the case again, it would be his third trial at Manhattan criminal court.                

Both Ms. Haley and Ms. Mann already accused Weinstein of sexual offenses in his first trial, which was held at the same courthouse in 2020. The jury found the defendant guilty on both counts, and the judge sentenced him to 23 years in prison. But in 2024, New York’s Court of Appeals vacated the verdict, after finding the trial judge had wrongly admitted witness testimony from women, who were not included in the indictment, such as the “Sopranos” star Ananbella Sciorra, who testified Weinstein barged into her apartment and raped her on the living room floor some time in the 1990s.   

For the retrial, which began in mid April and ended in mid June, prosecutors added a new charge by a new victim: Kaja Sokola. 

Kaja, who lives in New York and now describes herself as “an ex-model, practicing psychologist, scholar, advocate, and producer” on her LinkedIn page, first met Weinstein in 2002, when she was 16 years old and came to New York to work for a modeling agency. 

In a civil lawsuit she filed against Weinstein’s brother Bob Weinstein, Disney and Miramax in 2019, she claimed that Weinstein sexually assaulted her when she was underage. The suit was settled in 2023 and Kaja received around $3.5 million.  

Prosecutors did not charge the underage assault during the criminal trial; instead they accused Weinstein of another incident, which allegedly took place four years later in 2006. Weinstein had gotten Kaja, who was back in New York modeling and trying to become an actress, a role as an extra in the movie “The Nanny Diaries” starring Scarlett Johansson. When her sister Ewa came to visit, the producer met the two at a Manhattan hotel for lunch. 

According to Kaja’s testimony, Weinstein asked her to come to his room so he could show her a movie script. She followed him to the room, while her sister waited in the lobby. That’s when Weinstein allegedly threw Kaja onto the bed and forcibly performed oral sex on her. 

When prosecutors called Ewa to the witness stand, she testified that she remembered Kaja going up to the hotel room, but she “didn’t notice anything strange” about Kaja, when she returned. “She was quiet. But she was fine.” Ewa testified, adding her sister appeared tense, “like somebody waiting for the result of an exam.”

Ewa further told prosecutors that she first found out about the alleged sexual assault in a 2022 Rolling Stone article, and that she was shocked because Kaja had always spoken well about the Oscar-winning producer. 

“She was proud of knowing him,” she testified.  

During cross-examination, Ewa told the defense attorneys that she had recovered a private notebook that Kaja kept while she attended Alcoholics Anonymous to battle her alcoholism in Poland, and that in this notebook, Kaja was keeping a list of men who allergy sexually abused her, and Weinstein was not one of them. 

After the trial had ended, Kaja told several news outlets that she felt her sister had betrayed her. An article in Variety, published on June 14, ran the headline: “‘The Devastating Part Was Not the Trial Itself — It Was the Betrayal of My Sister.’”

Kaja told the outlet, “My sister was trying to do a lot of harmful things to me in the past…A lot of this was correlated with money, so we didn’t have — let’s say — the best relationship ever.” 

Ewa’s lawsuit claims that Kaja effectively accused her of “falsifying evidence,” when Kaja told the New York Post that she “wrote about Weinstein’s alleged rape in other diaries that she no longer has access to” and that Ewa “manipulated the situation and chose this one workbook.”

The perhaps most damning statements were made in an Instagram post on Kaja’s account to “8,000 followers” as the lawsuit claims, where Kaja wrote that Ewa “got drunk, seduced and slept with a man that proposed to me,” and that Ewa stole money from her bank account. Kaja further accused her sister of falsifying medical records and killing a patient.  

“Ewa is supposed to be a doctor,” the Instagram post cited in the lawsuit reads, “by falsification of medical documentation she should have her right to be a medical doctor taken away. She was accused of a death of a child which was hushed in my family…” 

Last but not least, Kaja accused her sister of colluding with Kaja’s ex-husband in their custody battle over Kaja’s son, who currently lives with her in New York. Kaja also accused her sister of stealing the boy’s passport. 

Kaja testified during the trial that her ex, who is Polish and lives in Poland, was abusive and that the two fought an ugly and long custody battle in the courts.  

According to Ewa’s lawsuit, Ewa first testified on her sister’s behalf in the custody proceedings, saying she was “stable, sober, and competent to care for her child.” But when Ewa realized Kaja’s alcoholism was “once again out of control, for the child’s safety she became a witness for the father to assist him in regaining custody.” 

Kaja’s passport allegation was published in an article in the Daily Mail, the lawsuit alleges, stating “She stole (Defendant’s child’s) passport from my house, she stole all of (Defendant’s child’s) IDs.” 

Ewa denies taking her nephew’s passport, and instead claims to have taken “the child’s Polish identification card and his insurance card (not his passport ever) at the request of representatives of the Administration for Children’s Services” after Kaja “had been taken into police custody for child neglect…” the lawsuit states. 

In an interview for the podcast The Villal Files, Kaja accused her sister of secretly meeting Weinstein’s defense attorneys and providing them with the journal that did not mention Weinstein. “She (Ewa) reached out to them (the defense team) and had many meetings before the trial. And there was this part about my journal. She probably had about 10 or 20 journals and she chose one thing that’s not even a diary. Like, you know, the depth of the betrayal and like the need to, I don’t know, like destroy me.”

Ewa’s lawsuit claims that these and other statements have exposed her “to public hatred, shame, contempt, ridicule, aversion, ostracism, degradation, and disgrace and gave viewers and/or readers an evil opinion” of the doctor, who has suffered actual harm in her “cardiology practice, including damage to her professional reputation, patient relationships, and her standing within the medical community.” 

Ewa is demanding an “injunctive relief prohibiting” her sister “from repeating… republishing, or further disseminating the defamatory statements” as well as monetary compensation and a jury trial. 

Kaja’s attorneys and spokesperson have not released any statements in response to the allegations.