a The massage therapist testified on Wednesday that the humiliation and embarrassment she felt when she allowed herself to be alone frequently with Harvey Weinstein after he sexually assaulted her kept her silent about it for years.
The woman testified that in 2010 when she was 28, after meeting Weinstein through a friend, she was hired to go to his hotel room in Beverly Hills for a massage.
The appointment cut short after about 40 minutes, and when she was in the bathroom washing her hands, Weinstein walked in, blocked the door, and began masturbating in front of her.
“I said, what are you doing?” The woman remembered saying it as she sat on the witness stand at the Los Angeles trial of the 70-year-old former movie mogul. “That’s inappropriate! Can you go back to the other room, and get dressed?”
She started crying, “I was terrified. I thought I was about to be raped.”
She said Weinstein was blocking the door and then pushed her against the wall and touched her breasts before he finished.
“I was in shock,” she said. “I was frozen and paralyzed. I was trying to understand.”
The woman, who will go along with Jane Doe in court, was the second of five women accused of sexually assaulting Weinstein to stand trial.
The Associated Press does not usually mention people who say they were sexually abused.
The woman said Weinstein called and texted her repeatedly after the incident.
After a month or so, she reluctantly agreed to see him again with the assurance that there would be no sexual contact. She testified but Weinstein opened his robe and exposed herself to him during that massage.
Later she saw Weinstein again, to work only on an injured foot, but when she finished, he started masturbating in front of her again.
She said she refused to take any money, and cried because she said she was “disgusted. Disgusted because it just happened to me, and I just stood there.”
“That’s one of the reasons why I don’t want to come forward, because that’s embarrassing,” she said.
She said she saw Weinstein again several months later, when she introduced him to a friend who was publishing a coffee table book about Los Angeles. She thought she could avoid being alone with him, but Weinstein asked to speak to her alone, and he again began to masturbate, moved towards her, and grabbed her breasts again.
“This time she cried.” She said.
When asked why she did not go to the police, she said: “I was humiliated, I was afraid.”
“I work with high-end clients who trust me,” she said. “If I disclose that I was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, and I don’t win, I won’t be able to work with high profile clients and that’s all I work with.”
When I finally went to the police years later, I only told them about the first incident. I only slowly revealed the others in conversations with the authorities and in testimony to the grand jury that indicted Weinstein.
He is charged with one count of sexual assault against a woman and faces a total of 11 counts of rape and sexual assault in California. He is serving a 23-year prison sentence for his conviction in New York.
Weinstein has pleaded not guilty and has denied engaging in any non-consensual sexual relationship.
The woman’s willingness to see Weinstein again after the initial alleged assault is likely to be the focus of her questioning Thursday by his attorney.
She said the first person she told about the assault was actor Mel Gibson, one of her clients and friend. He is expected to testify later in the trial.
The problem surfaced involuntarily, when she was giving Gibson a massage and the actor and director put up a movie he might have been working with Weinstein.
“I was shocked and started crying,” she said. “He was the first person I finally opened up about what had happened. I told him he had sexually assaulted me, but I didn’t want to go into all the details, I was embarrassed and humiliated.”
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