For more than 20 years, actress Annabella Sciorra says she has kept a horrific secret: Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein raped her in the 1990s, and sexually harassed her for years later.
Sciorra, 53, an Emmy-nominated actress for her role in “The Sopranos” and a film actress with credits like Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” to her name, on Friday became the latest in a string of at least 50 women to accuse Weinstein of sexual abuse and harassment.
The alleged rape occurred sometime around 1992, when Sciorra filmed “The Night We Never Met,” which was backed by Miramax, Weinstein’s then company.
She’d known Weinstein for a few years, she said. They often saw each other at events, dinners and screenings, and after one such evening in New York, she said, Weinstein offered to give her a ride home.
“Harvey had dropped me off before, so I didn’t really expect anything out of the ordinary – I expected just to be dropped off,” the petite Italian-American actress told The New Yorker.
Weinstein drove her home and said goodbye, and Sciorra went to her apartment and got ready for bed.
A few minutes later, someone knocked at the door.
“It wasn’t that late ... like it wasn’t the middle of the night, so I opened the door a crack to see who it was. And he pushed the door open,” she told The New Yorker.
Weinstein “walked in like it was his apartment, like he owned the place, and started unbuttoning his shirt. So it was very clear where he thought this was going to go. And I was in a nightgown. I didn’t have much on,” the actress said.
After he’d taken a circuit of the apartment – apparently making sure they were alone, Sciorra said – he grabbed at her.
“This is not happening,” she told him, according to The New Yorker. “You’ve got to go. You have to leave. Get out of my apartment.”
But Weinstein wouldn’t budge. He cornered her in the bedroom, she said.
“He was closing in really quickly, and I pressed all the call buttons for valet service and room service,” she said, adding that the burly producer left when a hotel staffer arrived.
Weinstein, who did a week at a therapy facility after initial allegations surfaced, denies all allegations of nonconsensual sex.
“Splash” actress Darryl Hannah also detailed hair-raising incidents with Weinstein for The New Yorker on Friday – although she said he was never able to get her alone.
On one press junket overseas, she said, for a Weinstein film, he strolled into her hotel suite late at night after letting himself in with his own key, she told The New Yorker.
“He came through the living room and into the bedroom. He just burst in like a raging bull. And I know with every fiber of my being that if my male makeup artist was not in that room, things would not have gone well. It was scary,” she said in the interview.