MOVIE NEWS – A former Polish-born model testified in tears Thursday in the Harvey Weinstein trial, saying the disgraced producer sexually assaulted her when she was just 16. Kaja Sokola, now 39, recounted the details of the 2002 incident in New York Criminal Court when she met Weinstein in a Manhattan apartment.

“I was scared, I’d never been in an intimate situation before,” Sokola testified in harrowing detail, adding that while Weinstein was harassing her, she noticed “watching from the mirror.”

“I’ll never forget that,” she said.

Kaja Sokola testified for the first time in criminal court, one of three accusers in a 2020 New York case accusing Harvey Weinstein of multiple sexual assaults. Weinstein was not charged in the alleged 2002 incident because the statute of limitations had expired.

Sokola also testified Wednesday that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her in the spring of 2006, when she was 19, at a Manhattan hotel, an incident the Miramax co-founder denies. The other two accusers, production assistant Miriam Haley and aspiring actress Jessica Mann, also testified at the previous trial. Their testimonies were key to launching the #MeToo movement nearly a decade ago, but the case is now being retried in New York.

The 2020 convictions in Haley and Mann were overturned last year by the New York Court of Appeals, which ruled that the treatment of witnesses in the original trial was unlawful.

Sokola says she first met Weinstein as a 16-year-old aspiring actress at a dinner party she attended with several models. The producer, who is almost 40 years her senior, called her a few days later and suggested lunch, but ended up taking her to an apartment where he asked her to undress.

“He forced me into the bathroom. I told him I didn’t want to, but he said I needed to work on my stubbornness,” she testified, adding that Weinstein touched her and forced her to touch him, until she ejaculated.

Sokola felt “stupid, shameful” as Weinstein, 73, sat in a wheelchair, looking at the jury and resting his forehead on his hand.

When she told him she wanted to leave, he got “furious” and said, “if I want a career in Hollywood, I have to listen to him,” added Sokola, who is now a psychotherapist.

She admitted that a year later, she lost a lot of weight and struggled with anorexia and bulimia. When prosecutor Shannon Lucey asked why she didn’t report the incident, she replied, “I thought it was my fault.”

“I was a happy teenager before it happened,” she said. “I had boundaries, but it happened so quickly, without my permission.”

Sokola said she met Weinstein again in 2006 for lunch, and he lured her to a Manhattan hotel room under the pretext of showing her a script. She testified that Weinstein pushed her onto the bed and raped her.

“I told him to stop,” he continued in his testimony Friday, “but he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Harvey Weinstein, the producer of Paperback and Shakespeare in Love, has never admitted to the charges. He is currently serving a 16-year sentence in California for raping and assaulting a European actress in an incident that occurred more than a decade ago.

Source: Yahoo