The model had arrived in New York City just days before in 2002. She had left her family behind in Poland and come across the world with hopes of becoming a star.
Then, she met Harvey Weinstein.
The model, Kaja Sokola, was 16, and Mr. Weinstein was a 50-year-old producer when they met at a club and he got her phone number, Ms. Sokola told a Manhattan jury Thursday.
He invited her to lunch to talk about her aspirations in movies, she recalled. Instead, he took her to his apartment in SoHo, where he forced her to masturbate him in a bathroom as he touched her.
On Thursday, more than 20 years later, Ms. Sokola recounted that day in court for the first time, at times breaking into sobs. Mr. Weinstein sat at the defense table, listening with his head resting on his hand.
After that encounter, Mr. Weinstein assaulted her several more times in the early 2000s, Ms. Sokola said. The incident that she described occurring she was a minor is too old to be the subject of criminal charges. But four years later, Ms. Sokola said, she was in New York for work and at a midday meeting with Mr. Weinstein and her older sister when he brought her to a hotel room and sexually assaulted her.
That incident is part of a criminal case against Mr. Weinstein being heard in a retrial that began last month. Mr. Weinstein is charged with committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree against Ms. Sokola, one of three women whom prosecutors say he attacked.
In 2020, Mr. Weinstein, 73, was convicted of sex crimes in New York and sentenced to 23 years in prison. But the state’s highest court last year overturned the decision. The judges found that prosecutors should not have been allowed to call as witnesses women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, but whose accusations were not the basis for any charges.
Mr. Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to the new set of charges and his lawyers insist that his interactions with the women were consensual. He has been convicted of similar charges in California and sentenced to 16 years in prison there. He is appealing that case.
Mr. Weinstein has faced years of legal trouble after accusations against him set off the global #MeToo movement. The man behind “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love,” he was known for making the careers of Hollywood stars. He also wielded his power to harass and sexually assault women, many of whom were young and trying to make it in the industry, according to dozens of women who came forward.
An investigation by The New York Times found that Mr. Weinstein had paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades.
Prosecutors argue that Mr. Weinstein used his influence to exert “enormous control” and sexually assault not only Ms. Sokola but also Jessica Mann, an aspiring actress who said Mr. Weinstein attacked her in 2013, and Miriam Haley, a former television production assistant who said he assaulted her in 2006. Ms. Haley took the stand against Mr. Weinstein last week.
Like Ms. Haley, Ms. Sokola had met Mr. Weinstein as she was looking for work in New York and thought the producer could open doors.
In the spring of 2006, just before Ms. Sokola’s 20th birthday, Mr. Weinstein met her and her sister around lunchtime, she said. He had just helped her get a role as an extra in the movie “The Nanny Diaries,” which she thought might signify a “change of pattern” for Mr. Weinstein. She thought that perhaps he truly saw her potential, she said. And if Mr. Weinstein believed in her, then her mother and sister, who had looked down on her acting aspirations, might take her seriously, she told the jury.
After about half an hour of conversation, Mr. Weinstein asked Ms. Sokola to accompany him to a hotel room so she could look at a script, she said. There, she said, he forced her into oral sex.
Ms. Sokola’s older sister, Ewa Sokola, testified on Wednesday that her sister returned to the table after about half an hour, “acting tense.” She added that her demeanor was like that of someone anxiously awaiting the results of a school exam.
“I asked her about what happened, and she said everything was fine,” Ewa Sokola said.
Kaja Sokola did not mention an assault and the pair went about their day normally, her sister said. On cross-examination by Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, Michael Cibella, Ewa Sokola said that she did not know about her sister’s allegations against Mr. Weinstein until she saw a Rolling Stone article about them in 2022. She was “shocked,” she said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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