Actresses Annabella Sciorra and Daryl Hannah have come forward to give their own accounts of how they experienced sexual assault and harassment at the hands of Harvey Weinstein, in a new exposé by The New Yorker published on Friday, October 27.
Sciorra, 57, who met Weinstein in the early 1990s and appeared in the producer’s 1993 movie The Night We Never Met, detailed a violent assault that she says happened after a business dinner in New York City. The actress claims Weinstein gave her a ride home that night, and Sciorra was getting ready for bed when he knocked on the door and once she opened it, pushed his way inside. “He 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,” she recalled.
“He shoved me onto the bed, and he got on top of me. I kicked and I yelled,” she recalled and said the producer grabbed her arms with one hand and forced her to have sex. The Sopranos actress claims he then tried to perform oral sex on her and her body started to shake violently. “I think, in a way, that’s what made him leave because it looked like I was having a seizure or something.”
Sciorra never went to the police to report the attack. “Like most of these women, I was so ashamed of what happened,” she said. “And I fought. I fought. But still, I was like, Why did I open that door? Who opens the door at that time of night? I was definitely embarrassed by it. I felt disgusting. I felt like I had f–ked up.”
Hannah, 56, spoke of two incidents she had with the producer after meeting him at the Cannes Film Festival. The two exchanged information for a possible business meeting and after ignoring his phone calls to her hotel room one night, he started knocking on the door. “It was sort of incessant, and then it started turning into pounding on my door,” the Kill Bill actress said, revealing that she left the room through an exterior door and slept in her makeup artist’s room, but he returned the next morning. “The knocking started again and again. And I was like, ‘Oh, s–t.’ We actually pushed a dresser in front of the door and just kind of huddled in the room.”
In 2004, Hannah was in Italy for the premiere of Kill Bill: Volume 2, when she encountered Weinstein in her hotel room again. “He had a key. He came through the living room and into the bedroom. He just burst in like a raging bull,” she said. “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.”
The actress claims Weinstein told her there was a party she had to go to, and when she arrived the reception was “completely empty.” Weinstein was standing by the elevator waiting for her. She recalled their interaction after she asked what was happening with the party: “‘Are your tits real?’ Then he asked if he could feel them. I said, ‘No, you can’t!’ And then he said, ‘At least flash me, then.’ And I said, ‘F–k off, Harvey.’”
Hannah said she felt the immediate repercussions of her refusal the next day, even after she told colleagues, including Quentin Tarantino. “I did tell people about it,” she said. “And it didn’t matter.”
More than 40 women, including Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow, have come forward with allegations of sexual harassment, assault and misconduct against the mogul. Weinstein has denied all the accusations against him, with his spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, saying in a statement in response to Sciorra and Hannah’s allegations that, “Mr. Weinstein unequivocally denies any allegations of non-consensual sex.”
