For more than 20 years, actress Annabella Sciorra says she has kept a horrific secret: Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein raped her in the 1990s, and sexually harassed her for years later.
Sciorra, 53, an Emmy-nominated actress for her role in “The Sopranos” and a film actress with credits like Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” to her name, on Friday became the latest in a string of at least 50 women to accuse Weinstein of sexual abuse and harassment.
The alleged rape occurred sometime around 1992, when Sciorra filmed “The Night We Never Met,” which was backed by Miramax, Weinstein’s then company.
She’d known Weinstein for a few years, she said. They often saw each other at events, dinners and screenings, and after one such evening in New York, she said, Weinstein offered to give her a ride home.
“Harvey had dropped me off before, so I didn’t really expect anything out of the ordinary – I expected just to be dropped off,” the petite Italian-American actress told The New Yorker.
Weinstein drove her home and said goodbye, and Sciorra went to her apartment and got ready for bed.
A few minutes later, someone knocked at the door.
“It wasn’t that late … like it wasn’t the middle of the night, so I opened the door a crack to see who it was. And he pushed the door open,” she told The New Yorker.
Weinstein “walked in like it was his apartment, like he owned the place, and started unbuttoning his shirt. So it was very clear where he thought this was going to go. And I was in a nightgown. I didn’t have much on,” the actress said.
After he’d taken a circuit of the apartment – apparently making sure they were alone, Sciorra said – he grabbed at her.
“This is not happening,” she told him, according to The New Yorker. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”
But Weinstein wouldn’t budge. He cornered her in the bedroom, she said.
She remembered him saying things like, “Come here, come on, cut it out, what are you doing, come here,” the magazine reported.
“He shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me. I kicked and I yelled,” she said in the interview.
But Weinstein, now 65, held her down, with her hands over her head, she told The New Yorker. She fought him – wearing a white cotton nightgown that was a family heirloom from Italy.
“When he was done, he ejaculated on my leg, and on my nightgown. He said, ‘I have impeccable timing,’ and then he said, ‘This is for you,’” Sciorra told The New Yorker.
“And then he attempted to perform oral sex on me. And I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me,” she said.
Weinstein left, and Sciorra said she never spoke of the rape and never went to police.
But her work began to dry up; rumors that she was “difficult” came back to her, she told The New Yorker. From 1992 to 1995, she got no work, she said in the interview.
She finally got a job in “The Innocent Sleep” and went to London where, she said, Weinstein began calling her hotel.
Sciorra said Weinstein sent cars to the hotel and one night pounded on her room door. She asked the film producer to find her another place to stay, The New Yorker said.
Similar incidents occurred over the next few years, she alleged, the worst in 1997 when Sciorra found out Weinstein was in the room next to hers at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc.
“My heart just sank,” Sciorra told The New Yorker.
Early one morning, someone knocked on the door, she said. “There’s Harvey in his underwear, holding a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a tape, a movie, in the other. And it was horrific, because I’d been there before,” she told The New Yorker. She ran for the hotel room phone.
“He was closing in really quickly, and I pressed all the call buttons for valet service and room service,” she said, adding that the burly producer left when a hotel staffer arrived.
Weinstein, who did a week at a therapy facility after initial allegations surfaced, denies all allegations of nonconsensual sex.
“Splash” actress Darryl Hannah also detailed hair-raising incidents with Weinstein for The New Yorker on Friday – although she said he was never able to get her alone.
