Harvey Weinstein accuser Kaya Sokola tells jurors she was a ‘happy teenager' before meeting gone wrong
Weinstein already had attacked Sokola, now 39, when she was a 16-year-old model, rubbing her vagina under her pants and underwear in 2002, and two years later, he grabbed her breast in a limo, she testified at Weinstein's sexual assault retrial in Manhattan Supreme Court.
Though she recounted both alleged incidents on the stand Thursday, the charges against Weinstein focus on a May 2006 encounter at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, while her sister waited at a restaurant table downstairs.
Still, Sokola stayed in touch with Weinstein because she wanted to go to the famous Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, and she shot a scene in February 2006 in a role as an extra in 'The Nanny Diaries.'
And when her older sister, Ewa, visited her in New York for her birthday, Kaja had something to prove, she said.
'My mom was extremely upset that I didn't go to university,' Sokola said. 'She thought I made the dumbest decision with my life. She did not want me to go to acting school.'
She went to a lunch meeting with Weinstein at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, and brought her sister along with her.
'I was happy that my sister was there with me,' Sokola recounted. 'I really wanted to have her approval. I really wanted her to have a conversation [about me] with my mom that, 'She's not a joke, she has a chance, someone really believes in her and she's doing the right things right now.''
She added, 'With my sister there I was feeling safe and secure.'
About a half hour into the conversation — which included her sister commenting on Weinstein's weight and health, and on how 'great actresses from Europe start to act in American films and they become bad' — Weinstein invited Sokola to a room upstairs to read a movie script, she recalled.
But he didn't have a script for her, she said.
Instead, he pushed her onto a bed, pinned her with his body, removed her boots, stockings and underwear, and forcibly performed oral sex on her: 'My soul was removed from me,' she said.
'And I kept on saying, 'Please don't. Please stop. Please don't. Please stop. I don't want this,'' she recounted. 'But he didn't listen.'
The assault ended after Weinstein pleasured himself, and then told her, 'It wasn't that difficult, was it?' she said.
She didn't tell her sister what happened as they left the hotel, and made 'every effort that I could to not make her notice that anything was off.'
'No, after that,' she said, 'I never shared it with anyone. I blamed myself.'
Meanwhile, Ewa Sokola testified on Wednesday that she had no inclination her sister had been assaulted, and didn't learn of the allegations until seeing a 2022 Rolling Stone article.
Shortly afterward, Weinstein sent Kaja Sokola a birthday card, written to 'someone with a real zest for life,' with a note telling her, 'thought you would like some of these titles' and that they'd make her a movie lover.
Sokola also testified about the alleged 2002 assault, which happened when she was just 16 years old. She said she met Weinstein at a nightclub in lower Manhattan during a modeling trip to the New York and got his number to set up a lunch meeting.
When Weinstein picked her up in a private car a few days later, they drove past a restaurant and headed for his Soho loft instead, she said. There, he ordered her to take off her top, and he reached into her underwear in the loft's bathroom, while he guided her hand to his penis, she testified
After the abuse, she said, she started to scream but he chided her that she 'had to work on my stubbornness,' and pointed out he had made the careers of actresses like Penelope Cruz and Gwyneth Paltrow, she said.
Sokola never reported to police what happened, she said: 'I thought it's my fault what happened. … I was a happy teenager before that. And I had boundaries. But this felt like my boundaries were not respected. They were completely crushed, and it happened so rapidly without my permission that I didn't know how to put it together, to understand it,' she said.
The retrial, which entered its third week of testimony, marked the first time Sokola aired her allegations in an open court proceeding.
Sokola didn't come forward until after October 2017, when several women went public in news reports about Weinstein. She received a $3 million settlement for the alleged 2002 assault from Disney, Miramax and Weinstein's brother and Miramax co-founder Robert. She also got $475,000 from a settlement fund for the alleged 2006 attack.
Weinstein was convicted by a Manhattan jury in 2020 of rape for an attack on aspiring actress Jessica Mann at the DoubleTree Hotel in 2013, and criminal sex act for assaulting former TV production assistant Miriam Haley in his SoHo loft in July 2006.
Weinstein's retrial covers allegations by Haley and Mann, as well the new allegations by Sokola. Haley took the stand for several days last week.
Weinstein's defense team is expected to cross-examine Sokola Friday.
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