One year after a woman testified in a packed courtroom against the disgraced film mogul Harvey Weinstein, she was back on the stand on Tuesday, telling a jury about the day she said he raped her in a Manhattan hotel room.
The witness, Jessica Mann, a former actress, walked in and out of the courtroom briskly, avoiding eye contact with Mr. Weinstein.
But as she delivered hours of emotional testimony, Mr. Weinstein watched her. He visibly reacted throughout her account: shaking his head, putting his head in his hands and talking to his lawyers.
Mr. Weinstein, 74, is facing Ms. Mann’s accusations for the third time after his conviction on a rape charge in 2020 was overturned. In a second trial, last June, the jury deadlocked on that count, and the judge ordered a new trial.
In her testimony in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Ms. Mann, 40, said that she was visiting New York in 2013 and had planned a morning meal with friends and the producer. He arrived early and got a hotel room over her objections, she said.
Nonetheless, she testified, she accompanied him to the room, where he injected his penis with medication that produced an erection and then raped her.
Ms. Mann cried on the witness stand on Tuesday as she described the encounter. But when the judge overseeing the case and the prosecutor questioning her asked if she wanted a break, she was adamant that she wanted to continue.
“I don’t like going in and out,” Ms. Mann told them.
The two previous times she testified, Ms. Mann left the stand to collect herself in the middle of her testimony. Last year, as she walked by Mr. Weinstein, she looked directly at him and pointed a finger at him. She then pointed at her tear-streaked face before walking away.
Five years before, after she left the courtroom, she could be heard screaming from a back room.
On Tuesday, as the day wore on and the questioning turned to details around her continued relationship with Mr. Weinstein after the encounter, Ms. Mann became flustered and frustrated. Around 3:20 p.m., at a prosecutor’s suggestion, she took a five-minute break.
The account Ms. Mann gave closely resembled her past testimony.
She recounted meeting Mr. Weinstein when she was about 27 and had moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Shortly after their first meeting, she said, he pressured her into giving him a massage. Soon after, she had what she described in writing at the time as a “failed threesome” with Mr. Weinstein and another actress, where she said she ended up in the bathroom having a “full-on breakdown.”
Ms. Mann’s accusations of rape center on an encounter between her and Mr. Weinstein at a DoubleTree hotel in Midtown Manhattan.
Ms. Mann said she tried to fight when he attacked her, but that he grabbed her wrist with “so much force” and pushed her back. Mr. Weinstein gave her “short, strict, precise and strong commands” to undress and get on the bed, she told the jurors.
“I said no over and over and I tried to leave,” she said, at times crying. “He was just treating me like he owned me.”
Afterward, she said, the breakfast proceeded as planned, and she did not tell anyone about the attack.
“I was not ready to talk about it,” Ms. Mann told the jury, adding that she had felt that “I got myself in this situation.”
In addition, Ms. Mann said, she was worried about crossing Mr. Weinstein.
“He told me that he has friends in this town and you don’t want to make him your enemy,” Ms. Mann testified. “‘My friends go far; my enemies don’t step foot in this town,’” she recalled his saying.
The encounter was toward the beginning of what Ms. Mann has described as a complex relationship that spanned about four years. As time passed and she struggled in her acting career, Ms. Mann said her interactions with the producer included friendly email exchanges, phone calls and several consensual sexual encounters.
In was in 2017, she said, when the first accusations of sexual assault against Mr. Weinstein surfaced, that she finally told others that he had attacked her.
“I thought it was just me,” Ms. Mann told the jurors last year, adding, “It was the first moment in my life that I realized that this is who he was and I just, like — it was a paradigm shift that it wasn’t my fault.”
Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, Jacob Kaplan, said in his opening statements last week that over four years, his client and Ms. Mann had fallen into a “mutually beneficial” arrangement, much of it detailed in emails, which Mr. Kaplan characterized as evidence of a “supportive and consensual relationship.”
“Harvey was the opportunity she had always been looking for,” Mr. Kaplan said.
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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