Harvey Weinstein accuser Mimi Haleyi on Monday testified that weeks after arriving in New York to work for one of his shows, she found herself fighting in vain as the once-revered Hollywood mogul pushed her onto a bed and sexually assaulted her, undeterred by her kicks and pleas of “no, please don’t do this, I don’t want it.”
Haleyi was the first to testify of the two women whose allegations led to Weinstein’s New York City criminal case.
Sobbing at times, she described how the film producer turned a friendly meeting at his Manhattan apartment in July 2006 into a terrifying ordeal that had her contemplating escape plans as he forcibly performed oral sex on her.
Photo: Reuters
“I was kicking, I was pushing, I was trying to get away from his grip,” the former Project Runway production assistant testified. “He held me down and kept pushing me down to the bed. Every time I tried to get up he pushed me down.”
Haleyi, now 42, told jurors she thought: “I’m being raped,” and wondered “If I scream rape, will someone hear me?”
She said she told Weinstein she was menstruating in an attempt to deter him, but that did not stop him.
“I checked out and decided to endure it,” she said. “That was the safest thing I could do.”
Yet just two weeks later, Haleyi said, she was accepting an invitation to Weinstein’s hotel room, where he pulled her into bed for sex.
Haleyi said that she “just felt like an idiot” for letting Weinstein convince her to meet again, but thought seeing him could help her regain power as she tried to make sense of the alleged assault.
Haleyi said she did not want to be intimate with Weinstein, but said she did not think Weinstein forced her to have sex.
Weinstein lawyer Damon Cheronis zeroed in on Haleyi’s continued interactions with Weinstein, scrutinizing her e-mails and calendar entries marked “HW” during cross-examination.
He said that she kept exchanging warm messages with him, pitched him on a TV show and made several trips on his dime, including jetting off to Los Angeles the day after the alleged assault and flying to London about a month later.
When they could not connect before she left London, she sent Weinstein’s assistant an e-mail lamenting: “totally bummed to have missed you guys.”
Explaining the fraught dynamics, Haleyi said she no longer feared Weinstein after “he basically had taken what he wanted” in the hotel room encounter and “wasn’t pursuing me in that manner” any longer.
In what seemed designed to be an aha moment, Cheronis asked Haleyi if the reason she kept in touch with Weinstein was “because he never sexually assaulted you.”
Haleyi pulled up the microphone, smiled exasperatedly and said: “No.”
In all, six accusers are expected to testify, but because of the statute of limitations and other legal technicalities, Weinstein is charged in only two incidents.
They are the alleged rape of an aspiring actress in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and the alleged sexual assault of Haleyi.
Under New York law applicable at the time, Weinstein is not being charged with rape in connection with Haleyi’s accusations.
Weinstein has insisted any sexual encounters were consensual.
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