When actress Jessica Mann met the Oscar-winning Harvey Weinstein, she thought it was a sign from God.
On Friday, the 34-year-old, who was raised as an evangelical on a dairy farm in Washington state, describes to jurors just how wrong her first impression had been.
She begins: “With my religious background and everything, I thought God was blessing me by having met him … I thought it was a blessing.” Mann says she and a friend met with Weinstein at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills in 2013, nominally about an upcoming project.
But then the 67-year-old invited them up to his room to look at the script. Once there, he invited Mann into the suite’s bedroom, where he pounced on her.
Mann says: “He then had me by both arms and he came at me, and he was pushing me back and trying to kiss me like crazy. I was like ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! I told you I’m not sexual, I don’t know you’ – all this stuff trying to calm it down.”
As she refused him, he became enraged, she says. Mann explains: “His anger scared me. I’m not letting you leave until you let me do something for you. Then he told me to sit on the bed … He put his mouth on my vagina.”
She faked an orgasm to put an end to it, and told him it was “the best.” Weinstein assaulted her on multiple occasions, she testifies, all while promising her top-notch roles in his films.
RELATIONSHIP
Despite all of this, she admits she made the “decision to be in a relationship” with Weinstein.
Mann says: “I entered into what I thought was a real relationship with him and it was extremely degrading from that point on. He would talk very dirty to me about fantasies and things and compare me to other actresses he said were doing kinky, dirty stuff. He always wanted to film me.”
DEFORMED?
Mann goes on, giving graphic testimony about Weinstein’s anatomy. She says: “The first time I saw him fully naked, I thought he was deformed and intersex. He has extreme scarring that I didn’t know if he was a burn victim but it didn’t make sense. He does not have testicles and it appears that he has a vagina.”
RAPE
In another incident, Mann says he raped her inside a DoubleTree hotel room in Manhattan. She wasn’t expecting him there, and had attempted to break it off on multiple occasions.
After, she says she found a needle that he used to give himself an erection.
Describing the moments before the assault, she says: “I was panicked because my worst nightmare was about to happen. I was very angry inside and very scared. I gave up at that point.”
He raped her again, she says, ripping her pants off and saying she owed him.
She was so afraid, she blacked out, she says. Mann is the fifth woman to testify against Weinstein and one of two on whom his criminal rape case is based. He has pleaded not guilty and faces life behind bars if convicted.