It was the summer of 2006, the night before they were scheduled to go to a premiere in Los Angeles, when Harvey Weinstein invited Miriam Haley to his apartment in SoHo.
Ms. Haley had spent three weeks as a production assistant on one of Mr. Weinstein’s television shows and felt she could not refuse, she told jurors in Manhattan on Wednesday.
But as she sat on a couch next to him, he lunged, she said. He overwhelmed her with kisses and groping. When she refused his advances and stood, he followed, she recalled, and kept “grabbing me and pushing me with his body.” She was backed into a bedroom and fell onto a bed, where every time she tried to get up, he forced her back down.
“My brain was calculating what the best course of action was for me in that moment,” Ms. Haley told the jury, at times speaking through tears. “I decided the smartest thing to do — safest, rather — is to check out, endure it and have it over with and leave.”
It was the second day of testimony for Ms. Haley, who was being questioned by a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office. She is the first to testify of the three women whose accusations are at the center of Mr. Weinstein’s retrial in New York.
Mr. Weinstein, 73, was convicted in 2020 of sex crimes and sentenced to 23 years in prison. Last year, New York’s highest court overturned that conviction in a 4-3 decision that said Mr. Weinstein had been deprived of a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to call witnesses who said he had assaulted them, but whose accusations were not backed by physical evidence and were not the basis for any of the charges.
The court ordered a new trial, and he again faces charges of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape. The prosecution is based on complaints by Ms. Haley, who worked for his company as a television production assistant, and by Jessica Mann, an aspiring actress. Mr. Weinstein is also newly charged with sexually assaulting Kaja Sokola, a model who has accused him of attacking her in a Manhattan hotel in 2006.
Mr. Weinstein has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers have said that his interactions with all of the women were consensual. He also faces prison in California after being convicted of similar crimes there.
Ms. Haley’s testimony is expected to last for days. She will be cross-examined by a defense team armed with transcripts of her earlier telling of her interactions with Mr. Weinstein.
As she spoke on Wednesday, Mr. Weinstein sat listening, at times with his left arm resting on the back of his wheelchair.
Describing that night in 2006 to jurors, Ms. Haley said she feared that the hulking producer’s actions could turn from forceful to violent. When she told him she was on her period and had a tampon in, he found it and “yanked it out,” she said, before he forcibly put his mouth on her vagina.
She thought, “I’m getting raped. This is what it is,” she told the jury.
Ms. Haley had first met the former Hollywood titan at a 2004 premiere in London, where she was living at the time, she said. Two years later, she reconnected with Mr. Weinstein in France.
She saw him at the Cannes Film Festival and asked him whether there were any opportunities at the Weinstein Company, his production firm in New York, she said. Mr. Weinstein invited her to a hotel for what Ms. Haley believed was a business meeting, she said. There, he commented on her legs, she said, and asked her for a massage.
The interaction made her feel embarrassed, she told jurors Tuesday, and as she left the hotel, she burst into tears.
Throughout her testimony, Ms. Haley was asked if she had felt romantic or sexual attraction to Mr. Weinstein at the time, to which she repeatedly said no. “I always made it clear that I wasn’t interested in him that way,” she testified on Wednesday.
Mr. Weinstein did find her a post working on his reality show “Project Runway,” she said. But his advances continued, she said. She said she had worked on the tail end of the season, about two to three weeks, and had been paid in cash.
During that time, Ms. Haley testified that she had some meetings and interactions with Mr. Weinstein that left her feeling respected. Others, she said, left her shaken.
At one point in 2006, after she had declined an invitation to travel with him to Paris on a private jet to go to fashion shows, he became insistent, she said. After calling her and messaging her repeatedly, he appeared unannounced at her apartment in Manhattan and barged inside, she said. He continued to request that she accompany him on the trip, she told the jurors.
Eventually, she told him, “I heard about your reputation with women,” in an attempt to get him to leave, she testified on Tuesday. Mr. Weinstein departed, she said, seeming “offended” and upset.
After these episodes, Ms. Haley still met Mr. Weinstein on the day that he bought her a ticket to travel to the premiere in Los Angeles. (She ultimately did not go, she testified.)
Last week, Ms. Haley’s former roommate told jurors about how Ms. Haley, seeming “very shaken and distraught and frightened,” told her that she had been assaulted by Mr. Weinstein.
Ms. Haley’s demeanor changed in the weeks and months afterward, said the woman, Elizabeth Entin.
She had previously had a “zest for life,” Ms. Entin said. After her encounter with Mr. Weinstein, she spent more time in her bedroom and “seemed to enjoy things a lot less,” Ms. Entin said.
Ms. Haley told jurors on Wednesday that after the episode that July, she felt disgusted, embarrassed and disbelieving. She decided against contacting the police because she felt Mr. Weinstein was too powerful and was worried that the police would focus on the fact that she was working without a proper visa, she said.
Several weeks later, she agreed to meet Mr. Weinstein at a hotel, thinking they would speak in the bar, she said. But when she arrived, she was told to meet him upstairs in a room, where he pulled her to the bed and had intercourse with her while she “lay there like a dead fish,” feeling stupid, she said.
Still, Ms. Haley said she had stayed in touch with Mr. Weinstein, asking to meet with him to pitch ideas and signing emails with comments like “lots of love” — a point Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers highlighted during the last trial as evidence of an amicable relationship.
Ms. Haley said Wednesday that she had felt trapped and had hoped to gain at least some professional benefit from the ordeal.
“I was desperate for work,” she said.
In 2017, after learning of allegations of sexual misconduct by Mr. Weinstein, she decided to tell her story.
“It felt more important, because it wasn’t just about me and I did want to support others,” Ms. Haley said.
