Speaking at Harvey Weinstein’s Los Angeles rape trial last week, Jane Doe No. 1 testified that she was forced to report her assault when her teenage daughter persuaded her to speak out.
Jane Doe No. 1 – who was the first witness to testify in the lengthy trial – claimed Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him and then raped her in 2013 while she was in LA on a business trip to the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival visited . Jane Doe #1 is a European model and actress who was living in Italy at the time she claimed Weinstein assaulted her. During her testimony, she said Weinstein, who was essentially a stranger at the time of the 2013 incident, showed up unannounced at her hotel room, forced his way into her room, and then sexually assaulted her. “He forced me to do what he asked,” she testified. “I cried.”
During her three-day emotional statement, Jane Doe #1 said she saw Weinstein at an event when she was back at the same film festival a few years later in 2017. She had brought her then-teen daughter to accompany her to LA to attend the festival, and her daughter noticed that her mother’s behavior suddenly changed when Weinstein was around. Not knowing anything about her mother’s alleged assault, she didn’t put the pieces together, but Jane Doe #1 later told her daughter that she had been sexually assaulted in the past.
Another layer of the story is that Jane Doe #1’s daughter was also sexually assaulted at school. When the daughter told her mother what happened to her, Jane Doe #1 confessed that she had also been raped so she could understand what her daughter was going through. The mother and daughter bonded over their shared trauma and made a pact with each other that they would both report their separate incidents to the police.
About a week after Jane Doe #1, her daughter – who the court identifies as “Maria C.” testified. to protect her identity – was asked by prosecutors to confirm her mother’s statements.
“Suddenly during the conversation, my mother became very nervous and I noticed that she started only looking in one direction of the room. After a few moments, she kept saying, “Let’s go upstairs,” where dinner is. ‘Let’s go, let’s go,'” Maria said, recalling the night her mother met Weinstein at the 2017 Los Angeles Italia Film Festival. She said she noticed that in the direction her mother was staring, “this man was sitting and staring straight at my mother and me, not taking his eyes off it.” She confirmed the man was Weinstein, and at that point in time she had no idea who he was.
Maria shared that at a celebratory dinner, Weinstein approached the table where she was sitting with her mother. “I noticed again that my mother looked very, very nervous, but this time she didn’t want to leave. This time it was fear,” she said. “She froze, she froze at that very moment… And just stared into space.”
When asked by the prosecutor, Assistant District Attorney Paul Thompson, why she remembered that moment, Maria said, “I remember that event particularly well because that same year, early in the fall, I was told by my mother that she had been raped by this man.”
The conversation in which Jane Doe told her daughter she had been raped took place a few months after she met Weinstein at the 2017 Italia festival. Maria said her mother initially didn’t tell her daughter the identity of her alleged abuser, but later eventually told her daughter it was Weinstein.
“I was informed at the beginning of the first few articles of the #MeToo movement who the man who raped her was,” Maria told the jury. She said that when her mum revealed it was Weinstein, she googled him and when she saw his photo online she realized it was the man her mum spotted at the festival and who she seemed scared of .
When Maria was cross-examined by Weinstein’s attorney, Alan Jackson, he drilled into her timeline of events and asked if she had changed details from her initial interviews with detectives on the case in 2018, such as: B. how long Weinstein stared at her mother, how she knew Weinstein was staring at her mother, and when her mother revealed Weinstein as her attacker. “Your story is changing,” Jackson said. “You didn’t say that in 2018.”
“My testimony is the truth,” Maria said on the witness stand. “I never changed my story.”
Jackson asked Maria if she had reported her own sexual assault to police in September 2017 and questioned why her mother hadn’t spoken to authorities about her alleged rape at the same time they were at the police station. (Maria had reported her incident before the #MeToo movement exploded with Weinstein’s exposés in October 2017, but her mother didn’t report her incident until shortly after those articles appeared.)
Maria became tearful, saying, “I only had the courage to speak out because my mother promised me” that she would go to the police about her alleged assault, which she finally did in October 2017, some four and a half years later, Weinstein is said to have raped her.
“It’s safe to say that you’re very close,” Jackson asked Maria about her relationship with her mother. “You love her very, very much?” Weinstein’s attorney asked.
“You would do anything for her?” Jackson asked Maria, who replied, “Yes,” before her statement ended.