Actress Annabella Sciorra took the witness stand in a Manhattan courtroom Thursday and faced down Harvey Weinstein, the once-powerful movie mogul she says raped her, tearfully describing the alleged incident in explicit detail for rapt jurors and a packed gallery of spectators.
In emotional and at times harrowing testimony, the Brooklyn-born “Sopranos” actress told the court that Weinstein forced his way into her Manhattan apartment when she was a rising star more than two decades ago and then forced himself on her — crassly congratulating himself for pulling out before his orgasm with the boast, “I have perfect timing.”
And when she privately confronted Weinstein about the alleged assault at a public event about a month later, Sciorra said, the Hollywood heavyweight callously responded, “That’s what all the nice Catholic girls say.”
“And then he leaned into me and warned, ‘This remains between you and I,’ ” she testified. “It was very menacing. His eyes were black and I thought he was going to hit me right there.”
Sciorra, 59, was the first of six alleged Weinstein sex-assault victims to take the witness stand at his Manhattan Supreme Court trial, where the disgraced producer is fighting five felony charges spurred by the outpouring of #MeToo allegations that followed 2017 exposés by The New York Times and The New Yorker.
The appearance of the actress — best known for playing a mistress of mob boss Tony Soprano on the landmark HBO show — led to mentions of her work with Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, and also prompted prosecution plans to call her friend and fellow actress Rosie Perez as a witness.
Weinstein — who claims that all his sexual encounters were consensual — isn’t charged in the alleged attack on Sciorra due to New York’s statute of limitations.
But her testimony is being used to underpin charges of predatory sexual assault involving two other women, hairstylist Jennifer Mann and former “Project Runway” production assistant Miriam “Mimi” Haleyi, that could send Weinstein, 67, to prison for life.
The claims of the three other women also fall outside the statute of limitations, but their testimony about Weinstein’s alleged MO has been ruled admissible to bolster the prosecution’s case.
After standing up in the witness box and pointing out Weinstein at the defense table, Sciorra said his attack took place in the winter of 1993-94 after she had dinner at an Irish restaurant with a group of about eight or nine people that included him.
When she got up to leave, Weinstein offered her a ride to her Gramercy Park apartment. She accepted and she was dropped off at about 9:30 or 10 p.m.
While preparing for bed — and wearing a treasured white nightgown that had belonged to her late grandmother in Italy — there was an unexpected knock at the door, Sciorra told jurors.
Choking up, she described how she opened the door, only to have Weinstein push his way inside and walk around “to see if there was somebody else there.”
“Then he began to unbutton his shirt and I realized that he thought we were going to be having sex,” she said. “I told him to leave and that this was not going to happen . . . but he kept coming at me and I felt very overpowered because he was very big.”
Weinstein is nearly 6 feet tall and weighs about 300 pounds, prosecutors have said.
Sciorra — who said she’s 5-foot-4 tall and was 110 pounds at the time — said she tried to escape into the bathroom but Weinstein grabbed the front of her nightgown and “led me into the bedroom . . . and he shoved me on the bed.”
Sciorra said she didn’t know “exactly when his pants came off,” but that “I was wearing my nightgown and did not have underwear underneath.”
“I was punching him, I was kicking him . . . and he took my hands and put them over my head like this,” she said as she crossed her wrists above her head. “And he got on top of me and he raped me.”
Sciorra said she “tried to fight, but I couldn’t fight anymore because he had my hands locked.
“At a certain point, he stopped and he came out of me and he ejaculated on top of me on my leg and my nightgown,” she said.
Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon then asked Sciorra if any words were said during the alleged incident.
“He said, ‘I have perfect timing,’ ” Sciorra said and wiped her eyes.
Tears streamed down her cheeks as she said, “He then proceeded to put his mouth on my vagina.”
“Before he did that, he said, ‘This is for you,’ ” she said.
“I said, ‘No,’ but there was not much I could do, at that point my body shut down. It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake in a way that was very unusual. I didn’t really know what was happening. It was like a seizure or something.”
Sciorra wept as she described how trauma from the alleged rape prompted “a lot of what I now know is called dissociative experiences,” along with heavy drinking and self-harm.
“I had this wall that was white and then I began to paint it like a blood-red color with tubed oil paint,” she said.
“I began to cut myself and I would drip blood from my fingers, from my hands, into this masterpiece and I would take, wherever I would put the blood . . . take pieces of gold leaf and mark it.”
She also said that the alleged rape took place after Weinstein, who had cast her to co-star with Matthew Broderick in the 1993 rom-com “The Night We Never Met,” sent her sent her two “care packages,” one of which was a “box of chocolate penises.”
“I thought it was disgusting and inappropriate,” she said.
The other package contained movies including “His Girl Friday,” licorice, popcorn and a bottle of Valium, which she called “an effort to help me relax and not be so stressed” because Weinstein wanted her to appear in back-to-back movies.
But Sciorra said the Valium led to an addiction that lasted several months before she was able to conquer it by weaning herself off the drug with a homeopathic anxiety remedy.
Weinstein then walked away and let himself out of the apartment, she said.
Sciorra — whose movie credits include lead roles in Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” in 1991 and the 1992 thriller “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle” — also described another incident where Weinstein knocked on her hotel door at 5 a.m. “in his underwear with a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a videotape in the other.”
Sciorra said it happened at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival in France to promote the Weinstein-produced drama “Cop Land,” in which she played a supporting role.
Sciorra said she “got very scared” and “backed into the room and pressed all the call buttons that were there” to summon hotel workers.
“People came and he left,” she said.
During cross-examination, lead Weinstein lawyer Donna Rotunno asked Sciorra why she didn’t reach out to the movie tough guys who starred with her in “Cop Land.”
“You were there with Sylvester Stallone?” Rotunno asked.
“I don’t know where Sylvester Stallone was staying. He could have been at his own house,” Sciorra said.
Rotunno called Stallone and co-star Robert De Niro “heavyweights.”
“Did you go to them and say ‘get this guy away from me?’ ” Rotunno asked.
“I never saw anybody until I was walking on the red carpet with Sly,” Sciorra replied.
Near the start of her questioning, Rotunno tried to undercut Sciorra’s credibility with six successive questions about her profession, during which Sciorra acknowledged being trained to “act and play whatever role is required of you.”
“You want the audience to believe that you are taking on that character?” Rotunno asked.
“I do my work well,” Sciorra responded.
Rotunno’s cross-examination also included pointed questions that suggested the actress didn’t try to escape or fight back hard enough against Weinstein.
Sciorra acknowledged that she didn’t flee when Weinstein allegedly barged past her or began unbuttoning his shirt, and said that she didn’t know if she scratched him or hit him in the face.
“Did you try to poke him in the eyes?” Rotunno asked, eliciting a “No” from Sciorra.
At one point, Rotunno confronted Sciorra with video of her Aug. 6, 1997, appearance on the “Late Show with David Letterman,” during which she said, “I have a bad reputation and I was caught recently in the last few years lying about quite a few things.”
“I would really not just, you know, fib but I would make up quite elaborate stories. There was one that I made up about Dennis Hopper and my father raising iguanas for the circus, or something like that,” she told Letterman.
During redirect questioning, Illuzzi-Orbon asked Sciorra, “Were you talking in any way, shape or form about lying about matters as serious as what we’re here for?”
“Absolutely not,” Sciorra said.
Sciorra also acknowledged under cross-examination that she didn’t immediately tell her friends about allegedly being raped by Weinstein or go to the police.
“At the time, I didn’t understand it was rape,” she said.
But weeks later, Sciorra told Perez that “I think something bad happened to me. I think I was raped,” Illuzzi-Orbon told the judge after the jury was dismissed for the day.
Perez later figured out that Sciorra was referring to Weinstein, Illuzzi-Orbon said, arguing that prosecutors should be allowed to call Perez as a witness to counter the defense’s attacks on Sciorra.
Justice James Burke didn’t immediately rule on the request.
Additional reporting by Lia Eustachewich