‘Undress Now’: Weeping Aspiring Actress Tells Jury How Harvey Weinstein Ordered Her To Submit, Still Didn’t Give Her an Acting Role

The key witness in the rape retrial against disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein broke down crying on the witness stand on Tuesday as she recalled the moment Weinstein allegedly raped her at a Midtown Manhattan hotel in 2013.“Undress now,” Ms. Mann remembered Weinstein saying to her. “He kept telling me to undress.” According to her testimony, the then-27-year-old aspiring actress had followed the then-60-years old producer to a room at the Midtown Manhattan Double Tree hotel to talk to him. She was visiting New York from Los Angeles and was staying at the hotel with a friend. It was March 2013. Ms. Mann had made plans to have breakfast with Weinstein, who lived in New York, and her friends later that morning. But Weinstein had arrived earlier than expected at the hotel, she said, and was in the lobby booking a room. “I see him at the front counter and he is checking in to get a room and that freaked me out,” Ms. Mann testified. “And I said, ‘what are you doing? We don’t need a room.’” Ms. Mann recalled Weinstein getting upset, and pulling her to the side, “he was grabbing me,” she said, and telling her not to “embarrass” her in public. “I thought I could just talk to him in private,” Ms. Mann testified, taking quick breaths as tears gushed down her face. “I just didn’t know what he was doing.” As soon as Ms. Mann and Weinstein arrived in the room, he allegedly immediately told her to undress. She said she tried to open the door – twice – and twice he “kept slamming it” shut, trapping her in the room. “And he threw himself on me,” Ms. Mann went on. She said the producer weighed about 300 pounds and measured six feet. While she was 5feet and 4 inches tall and only weighed 110 pounds. “I obeyed and I undressed,” the witness told the court, gasping for air as she was seemingly overwhelmed by the memory. “Until I was fully naked… And then he went to the bathroom… And I don’t know what he did in there… And then got on top of me.” Before she uttered the word “rape” Ms. Mann wept. She took a deep breath, and said “He started to rape me.. He put his penis inside me… And that never happened before and that felt weird.” She managed to tell the jury that once he was done, she went into the bathroom and saw a needle in the waste basket, which freaked her out. Unlike in the 2020 and 2025 trials, Ms. Mann did not go into detail about the needle. Instead, prosecutors read jurors a statement – approved by the defense – that said that Weinstein used the needle to inject his penis directly with a powerful drug combination he needed to be able to perform sexually.Following her description of the sinister needle, Ms. Mann completely broke down crying. The judge asked her if she needed a break, but she declined. Several times throughout her testimony both the judge and the prosecutor asked if she needed to take a moment. But Ms. Mann told the court she didn’t want to interrupt herself. “I don’t like going in and out,” she said. It was the third time Ms. Mann testified about the rape in open court during a trial, and the third time she has brought her charge against Weinstein in the same lower Manhattan courthouse.In 2020, Ms. Mann’s rape accusation was part of the first indictment brought against Weinstein by the Manhattan District attorney’s office both as a first-degree and a third-degree charge. The jury acquitted him of the first-degree rape, a class B violent felony that carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. However, it did convitced him on the third-degree rape charge, a class E felony, punishable by a maximum of 4 years behind bars. The conviction was overturned when New York’s Court of Appeals vacated Weinstein’s guilty verdict in 2024, reasoning the trial judge had wrongly allowed damaging testimony by women whose allegations were not part of the indictment. One of these so called “Molineux witnesses” was the “Sopranos” star, Annabella Sciorra, who vividly testified that Mr. Weinstein barged into her apartment and raped her sometime in the 1990s, then ruined her career after she refused his further advances. In 2025, The Manhattan District Attorney’s office retried their case Weinstein, including the rape charge by Ms. Mann. After contentious deliberations, the jury could not agree on a verdict, and the judge declared a mistrial. Ms. Mann, who had testified in both the 2020 and the 2025 trials, wore the same clothing she had worn on Monday, tight blue pants, a beige jacket and weight sweater. Earlier in the day, she had told the jury that she felt Weinstein enjoyed exerting power and would get aggressive when he was told “no” by anyone. He would threaten to fire waiters in restaurants, if they disobeyed him. “I’ll get this person fired,” she remembered him saying. She would also overhear him talking on the phone with people from the film industry threatening to ruin an actress’s career for not doing what he had wanted. “He would be on the phone with an actor yelling… ‘I will blacklist her… She’ll never work again.’” “I felt like he was very proud of his power,” Ms. Mann told the court. When an Assistant District AttorneyNicole Blumberg asked Ms. Mann why she didn’t immediately tell her friends about the rape, Ms. Mann replied that, “I don’t know why there is the expectancy to talk about it?” She said she did not feel comfortable talking about it, that it was a personal matter and that she was trying “to act normal.” She told the jury that Weinstein had told her and her friend they would be perfect fits for leading roles in an upcoming movie he was producing, “Vampire Academy,” based on the young adult paranormal romance book series by Richelle Mead. Ms. Mann felt afraid, she said, that if she would upset Weinstein, he could ruin her career. She was not cast in “Vampire Academy,” which Mr. Weinstein’s company did distribute in the U.S. in 2014. It was a poorly reviewed, box office bomb.Cross-examination is expected to begin Tuesday.

‘Undress Now’: Weeping Aspiring Actress Tells Jury How Harvey Weinstein Ordered Her To Submit, Still Didn’t Give Her an Acting Role

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