The woman whose rape allegation against Harvey Weinstein lies at the heart of the multi-convicted film producer’s third Manhattan prosecution was at times unable to speak as, for the third time this decade, she recounted the incident on the witness stand Tuesday.
With tears rolling down her face, a shattered-sounding Jessica Mann repeated her account of an encounter with Weinstein at the DoubleTree hotel in Midtown on March 18, 2013, which she spent days testifying about when Weinstein was first tried in Manhattan in 2020 and again at his retrial last year.
“I was begging him, like, ‘Please, don’t. I don’t want to,’” Mann testified in Manhattan Supreme Court.
In 2020, Weinstein was found guilty of raping Mann in addition to sexually assaulting Miriam Haley, a former “Project Runway” assistant. But the conviction was overturned by New York’s Court of Appeals in 2024 based on evidence unrelated to either woman’s testimony.
The disgraced Miramax founder — who was convicted of separate rape and sexual assault charges in California in 2022 — went back on trial in Manhattan last year when prosecutors retried the 2020 case. He was again convicted of sexual assault in connection with Haley’s allegations, but the second jury was deadlocked on the rape charge tied to Mann, leading to the third New York case now on trial.
The 73-year-old Weinstein kept his eyes trained on Mann throughout her Tuesday testimony, intermittently whispering to his attorney, Teny Geragos. Mann, positioned to face the jury, did not appear to look over at the defense table once.
The 2013 incident came not long after Mann had met Weinstein in Los Angeles and he’d taken her on as a sort of mentee, she said Tuesday, leading her to believe she’d been discovered. Her first time visiting New York City, Mann had made plans to introduce her two friends to the larger-than-life Weinstein over breakfast. Instead, the producer turned up early at the hotel where she was staying on Lexington Ave. and 51st St., inducing panic, Mann said.
Mann told the court that she came down to Weinstein in the lobby in a frenzy, trying to deter him from booking a room.
“And then he got upset, and he pulled me aside,” she testified. “He was grabbing me, and he said, ‘Don’t embarrass me in public.’”
The witness said she obeyed Weinstein, hoping to talk him down from whatever he had planned to do once they were upstairs, but that the situation quickly became volatile when the hotel room door closed.
“It was like he didn’t care to listen,” Mann said. “I remember feeling angry, and I tried to leave, and I tried to open the door twice with all my strength.
“He kept slamming it. So now he’s trapped me in this room, and he kept telling me to ‘Undress now!’, and then when I didn’t, he, he — he grabbed both my arms,” the witness continued, sobbing uncontrollably.
“He just treated me like he owned me.”
Mann repeated her prior testimony about Weinstein using the bathroom before the attack and her later finding a syringe in the bathroom’s trash can afterward. After the testimony, Assistant District Attorney Nicole Blumberg read a stipulation to the jury about Weinstein having a prescription for a needle-administered fluid to aid his erectile dysfunction.
The jury hearing the current case will be tasked with examining one thread in the tapestry of sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein that led to his 2017 downfall and spurred the #MeToo reckoning against sexual harassment in the workplace and the inherent power imbalances that fuel it.
At the time of the alleged 2013 attack, Weinstein was beyond reproach in Hollywood, the jury has heard. The incident came on the heels of the prolific filmmaker’s studio’s latest Oscar wins for “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Django Unchained.”
Mann, then 27, was dead broke, at times living in her car, and had moved to L.A. with little more than the clothes on her back after a particularly challenging upbringing in rural Washington.
The actor and hairstylist was questioned extensively by Blumberg about her dynamic with Weinstein and is expected to face a grilling about its complicated nature when cross-examination begins.
By her own admissions, now repeated for the third time, Mann often willingly engaged in sexual activity with the much older Weinstein. The alleged 2013 rape is one of several encounters in which Mann said she explicitly told Weinstein no, though he is only criminally charged for that incident.
Mann has told the jury that she was taken in by Weinstein’s fixation on her and truly believed he thought she was set for stardom. She said her consenting to many sexual encounters and a relationship with the then-married man was partly down to a misguided sense that he might treat her better if she obeyed his commands.
During one line of questioning on Tuesday about why she didn’t speak up after the 2013 attack, Mann sounded somewhat incredulous.
“I don’t know why there’s an expectation that I would say that,” she said. “It’s so private, and I’m processing it. I don’t want to lose control or tell somebody — you don’t know what happens when you do that.”
“Honestly, I blame myself for all of it: It’s somehow my fault. I have to figure this out,” she later said, describing her thought process, telling the prosecutor that the feeling she was responsible for others’ bad behavior toward her was a through line in her life.
“It’s because of something I did, I got myself in a situation,” Mann said. “I’m paying the price for it.”
During another back-and-forth, Mann tried to articulate to the prosecutor the experience of being hardwired to feel worthless.
“I never really felt worthy in my life,” she said through tears. “I don’t feel like I knew who I was.”
The trial continues on Wednesday.