WARNING: This article may affect those who have experienced sexual violence or know someone affected by it.
Five years after she first told her story to a jury, a former TV production assistant testified anew Wednesday that Harvey Weinstein held her down on a bed and forced oral sex on her after she told him: “No, no — it’s not going to happen.”
“The unthinkable was happening,” Miriam Haley testified, dabbing her eyes as she recalled the alleged events of July 2006.
Weinstein, sitting between his lawyers, shook his head as she spoke.
Haley, who has also gone by the name Mimi Haleyi, is the first of the ex-Hollywood honcho’s accusers to testify at his rape retrial. It’s happening because New York’s highest court overturned Weinstein’s 2020 conviction.
The 73-year-old former studio boss has pleaded not guilty and denies sexually assaulting anyone.
Haley, now 48 and working in advertising, testified at the original trial, sometimes breaking into sobs. Her demeanour Wednesday was calm and matter-of-fact, if briefly tearful, as she answered prosecutors’ graphic questions.
While much of her account mirrored her earlier testimony, there were some additional details.
She recalled Weinstein asking, “Don’t you think we’re much closer now?” after either the alleged assault or a subsequent occasion when she says she had unwanted, but not forced, sex with him.
She also recalled telling him after the second encounter, “You know you can’t keep doing this.”
Weinstein’s attorneys haven’t yet had their chance to question her and potentially try to poke holes in her account. The defence has argued that all of Weinstein’s accusers consented to sexual encounters with him in hopes of getting work in show business.
Worked on Project Runway
Haley got to know Weinstein through a mutual connection. She worked in June 2006 on the Weinstein-produced reality show Project Runway and had a series of interactions with him that were sometimes inappropriate and suggestive, but other times professional and polite, she told jurors over two days of testimony so far.
Two months before the alleged sexual assault, Haley said she went to Weinstein’s hotel room to speak about potential jobs in the movie and TV business, only for him to quickly change the subject and suggest they give each other massages. She refused his advances and says she burst into tears as soon as she left.
She insisted she was only ever looking for professional opportunity — not sex or romance — with the then-powerful producer of such Oscar winners as Shakespeare in Love and Gangs of New York.
Haley testified Wednesday that she accepted an invitation to visit Weinstein’s Manhattan apartment one early evening because she felt it would have been odd to decline — she was due to fly on his company’s dime to Los Angeles the next day to see a premiere of the film Clerks II, which Weinstein’s company co-produced.
After she and Weinstein briefly chatted on his living room sofa, he lunged to kiss her, she testified. She said she leapt up and rejected him, but he grabbed her and forcibly backed her into a bedroom.
Then, Haley said, he pinned her down on a bed and performed oral sex on her, ignoring her pleas that she didn’t want it.
Afterward, she felt shocked, disgusted and humiliated. She and two of her friends testified that she soon told them that Weinstein had sexually assaulted her.
But Haley, who was born in Finland and raised in Sweden, said she didn’t call police because she feared getting in immigration trouble for having worked on Project Runway while on a tourist visa.
Haley said she agreed to meet Weinstein at a Manhattan hotel a few weeks later, expecting they’d talk in the lobby and hoping “to navigate the whole situation in a way that would make me feel better about myself and would have the most upside to me.”
When she was told instead to go to his room, she did, and let him steer her onto the bed. She said she didn’t want sex but didn’t physically resist because she felt stupid for agreeing to meet him.
Still, “I made it clear at all occasions when he made advances that I didn’t want to go there,” she said.
Continued contact
Haley didn’t cut off contact with Weinstein, however. She asked his assistant for a plane ticket to London later that summer.
Over the next few months and years, she sometimes called Weinstein and sent cordial emails to him and his assistant, according to documents shown to jurors.
At one point, she pitched Weinstein on an idea for a TV show. In other messages, she talked show business, asked for work and signed off with such sentiments as “lots of love.” Haley said she used the phrase with many people.
She testified that she stayed in touch because she needed work and wanted to derive some professional benefit from knowing Weinstein.
At the first trial, defence lawyers emphasized Haley’s continued exchanges with the man she accused of sexually assaulting her. This time, prosecutors delved into those contacts more extensively, perhaps to address them during a friendlier phase of questioning.
Weinstein’s retrial includes charges based on allegations from Haley and another accuser from the original trial, Jessica Mann, who was once an aspiring actor. She alleges that Weinstein raped her in 2013.
He’s also being tried, for the first time, on an allegation of forcing oral sex on former model Kaja Sokola in 2006. Her claim wasn’t part of the first trial.
Mann and Sokola also are expected to testify at some point.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who allege they have been sexually assaulted unless they give permission for their names to be used. Haley, Mann and Sokola have done so.
If you’re in immediate danger or fear for your safety or that of others around you, please call 911. For support in your area, you can look for crisis lines and local services via the Ending Violence Association of Canada database.
