They met at a party in Los Angeles. She was an up-and-coming actress at the time. He was a young producer. As they got to know each other over the next four years, there were, she said, some “inappropriate” gestures: a care package of popcorn and Valium, a box of chocolate penises.
Then, Annabella Sciorra said on the witness stand on Thursday, Harvey Weinstein raped her.
Fighting back tears, Ms. Sciorra testified in excruciating detail to a rapt courtroom about the night she said she was attacked. After shoving his way into her Manhattan apartment, she said, Mr. Weinstein took her to a bedroom, forced her onto the bed and, as she sought to fight him off, sexually assaulted her.
“I was trying to get him off me,” Ms. Sciorra told the jury. “I was punching him, kicking him.” But Mr. Weinstein held her down, she said, adding: “He got on top of me and he raped me.”
The searing testimony in State Supreme Court in Manhattan marked the first time that one of Mr. Weinstein’s numerous accusers took the stand against him at a long-awaited criminal trial that has come to symbolize the #MeToo movement.
Five more accusers are also expected to testify that Mr. Weinstein attacked them. He faces charges of rape and criminal sexual act based on the allegations of only two of those women: an aspiring actress from Washington State who says Mr. Weinstein raped her in 2013, and a production assistant who says he forced oral sex on her in 2006.
The other three women will testify to similar incidents in an effort to show a pattern of predatory behavior, prosecutors said.
Ms. Sciorra’s complaint is too old to be prosecuted as a rape under New York law, but prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office plan to use her allegation to help support a charge of predatory sexual assault. To prove that charge, which carries a possible life sentence, prosecutors must show he committed a serious sexual offense against at least two people.
[The Weinstein trial began with vivid descriptions of several sexual attacks.]
Ms. Sciorra, who is best known for her role in “The Sopranos,” took the witness stand around 10 a.m. After rising to identify Mr. Weinstein, she gave an account of her assault, which she said took place in her apartment in Gramercy Park in late 1993 or early 1994.
She told the jury that on the night of the attack, she had joined Mr. Weinstein at an uneventful dinner with several other people at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Mr. Weinstein offered to drive her home, she said, and after he dropped her off at 10 p.m., she went upstairs, got into a nightgown and brushed her teeth, preparing herself for bed.
Moments later, she recalled, there was a knock at her door and she thought it was a neighbor or her doorman. But when she opened the door, she said, she saw it was Mr. Weinstein. Ms. Sciorra said he pushed his way inside.
When Mr. Weinstein unbuttoned his shirt, she said, she realized “he thought we were about to have sex.” She told the jury that she considered running into her bathroom, but before she could, Mr. Weinstein grabbed her in the chest area, led her into a bedroom and raped her on the bed, ejaculating on her leg.
“I was just shaking like a seizure — I don’t know how else to describe it,” she said. “I woke up, but I’m not sure if I fainted, blacked out or fell asleep.” She said that she woke up on the floor with her nightgown “kind of up.”
He then performed oral sex on her and said, “This is for you,” Ms. Sciorra recounted.
She said that when she saw Mr. Weinstein at a restaurant several weeks later, she confronted him about the incident.
“This remains between you and I,” she recalled Mr. Weinstein telling her.
Under questioning by a prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi, Ms. Sciorra acknowledged that she never called the police, saying she was “confused.”
“He was someone I knew,” Ms. Sciorra said. “I felt at the time that rape was something that happened in a back alleyway in a dark place.”
Ms. Sciorra said the attack left emotional scars. She started to drink a lot and even to cut herself. Sometimes, she recalled, she would slice her hands and fingers and paint a white wall in her apartment “blood red.”
When prosecutors finish questioning Ms. Sciorra, she is all but certain to undergo an aggressive cross-examination by Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, who cast doubt on her story in the defense’s opening statement on Wednesday.
Damon Cheronis, one of the lawyers, said during the opening statement that Ms. Sciorra had been unable to provide investigators with the exact date of the alleged rape, indicating only a period during the winter months between 1993 and 1994.
“Because there is no date given, we can’t go interview people to figure out where Harvey Weinstein was that day,” Mr. Cheronis said. “We can’t interview neighbors to figure out what happened.”
Mr. Cheronis added that “a good friend” would say that Ms. Sciorra had characterized the sex with Mr. Weinstein as consensual, acknowledging that she had done “a crazy thing.” Ms. Sciorra, he said, “didn’t describe it as rape because it wasn’t.”
“It follows the narrative of the scary Harvey Weinstein who appeared in an apartment in Gramercy without checking in with the doorman and who barged into an apartment,” Mr. Cheronis said. “That didn’t happen.”
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