It’s the sequel nobody anticipated. Harvey Weinstein is being retried for alleged intercourse crimes towards two ladies—former manufacturing assistant Miriam “Mimi” Haley and aspiring actress Jessica Mann—in New York Metropolis, the place his convictions on those self same costs suffered a uncommon overturn precisely a 12 months in the past. Solely this time, a 3rd lady is becoming a member of them on the stand, a hitherto nameless complaining witness whose testimony may show crucial. Her Jane Doe identification was lastly solid off on the trial’s splashy opening day, when she revealed herself to be a Polish former runway mannequin turned psychotherapist named Kaja Sokola, who has accused the as soon as omnipotent Hollywood producer of sexually assaulting her in a Tribeca lodge room in 2006.
Rebutting these allegations earlier than a jury final month, Weinstein’s lead trial legal professional, Arthur Aidala, has mentioned that his shopper had long-term relationships with Haley, Mann, and Sokola, suggesting each one in all these ladies was willingly “playing around” as she appeared to “reduce the road” to stardom.
One of many chief causes Weinstein’s 2020 conviction within the preliminary trial was scrapped on attraction was the prosecution’s parade of Molineux witnesses—a lineup of three ladies recounting prior dangerous acts of Weinstein’s, all claims of assault, however none of them criminally charged. Successfully denied a second lineup of such witnesses to ascertain Weinstein’s alleged patterns of abuse, Manhattan’s D.A., Alvin Bragg, sought out a minimum of yet another feminine who may very well be tied to formal costs within the do-over.
Prosecutors additionally doubtless anticipated fatigue within the press with what would now be Haley and Mann’s twice-told tales; the benches for courtroom spectators have hardly been elbow-to-elbow this go-round, and a recent face would spur larger information protection, actually.
Watching Harvey Weinstein’s sex-crimes conviction get overturned certainly rankled the Manhattan D.A.’s workplace. The mortally unwell film producer may have been dispatched to Los Angeles to start his 16-year sentence for his rape conviction there as he awaits outcomes of his attraction on that case. However Bragg is up for re-election, and taking Weinstein down may assist wipe latest reminiscences of acquitted subway vigilante Daniel Penny and hush-money backhander Donald Trump slipping by means of the Workplace’s fingers. Bragg himself sat second row as Assistant District Lawyer Shannon Lucey staked the federal government’s revised case towards Weinstein.
Weinstein is weak from leukemia and dank jail cells, his coronary heart and funds barely stuttering alongside as New York Metropolis Well being + Hospitals proceed to argue he needs to be again at Rikers Island jail as a substitute of at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital jail ward. He’s on what appears to be the final of his 9 lives. However his attorneys, pointing to obvious inconsistencies in Sokola’s account, consider the brand new case is much from open-shut. And along with the alleged 2006 assault towards Sokola for which Weinstein has been formally indicted, prosecutors look like relying, as they did final time, on stunning accounts of one other assault for which Weinstein just isn’t being charged.
All of which is to say, he may beat this rap. Once more.
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It was spring 2006 when Weinstein took a hurried lunch on the Tribeca Grand Resort’s restaurant with the practically 20-year-old Sokola and her heart specialist sister, who was visiting. Prosecutors say Sokola wished to “showcase” to her sister that she knew Weinstein, so decided was she to show she was making headway towards an performing profession.
As prosecutors inform it, Weinstein all of the sudden advised Sokola he needed to go. However there was a script in his lodge room he wished to shortly present her.
That is the place, Sokola claimed on the stand, Weinstein eliminated her boots and stockings and pushed her down onto his mattress as he compelled oral intercourse on her, ignoring her cries of “please cease, I don’t need this.”
(Weinstein denies he ever had something however consensual intercourse with any of those ladies.)
Final September, a grand jury accused Harvey Weinstein of a felony sexual act within the first diploma, the identical cost Weinstein was initially convicted of again in 2020, when it was utilized to former manufacturing assistant Miriam Haley. On this case, there isn’t a actual date for mentioned incident, however fairly a variety: “from on or about April 29, 2006, to on or about Could 6, 2006.”
The 12 months of the alleged assault Weinstein finds himself charged with as we speak — 2006 — was a interval throughout which Sokola “was not effectively,” the prosecutor permits. She was consuming closely. She’s a lady “with many private struggles that by no means appear to subside,” was the A.D.A.’s sum-up on opening day. Whereas acknowledging that “Kaja’s points aren’t all Harvey Weinstein’s fault,” A.D.A. Lucey asserted that Sokola’s very first alleged run-in with Weinstein in 2002 — when the mannequin and aspiring actress was 16 — “modified Kaja in ways in which she continues to be coping with as we speak.”
Prosecutors are alleging Sokola had met Weinstein earlier that 12 months at a dinner at then-happening NoHo restaurant Butter, the form of place the place employed promoters imported fashions to come back “and be photographed round wealthy older folks on the membership,” within the D.A.’s model of occasions. (Weinstein’s attorneys disagree on the timing of their first meet. They postdate it to 2005, reassigning Sokola to a non-minor standing.)
Although her identification was withheld within the lead-up to the present trial, Sokola had already gone public about her early encounters with Weinstein years in the past. In a 2018 class motion go well with the place she was “Jane Doe,” she claimed that Weinstein had compelled her to provide him a handjob in 2002, making her the youngest alleged sufferer of his depredations. It was the start of what she would characterize as “a decade” of sexual and emotional abuse.
Towards the top of 2019, Sokola exited from the preliminary class-action go well with, citing “inadequate compensation for the victims” amongst different issues. In a second civil lawsuit, from 2019 along with her identify brazenly hooked up, Sokola focused Disney (which had owned Miramax in 2002); the entity of Miramax; Harvey; and Harvey’s co-CEO brother, Bob. It was quietly settled for $3 million in summer time of 2023, publicly-traded Disney doubtlessly below stress to make all of it go away. (Sokola had earlier obtained a further half million from a Weinstein Firm bankruptcy-proceeding settlement fund paying out different complainant ladies together with members of the category motion she’d bailed on, using the Tribeca Grand incident—the complete particulars of which had but to be made public.)
As lurid because the declare of sexual assault towards a minor could also be, prosecutors within the ongoing felony trial have declined to cost Weinstein for the alleged 2002 encounter, maybe resulting from such inconsistencies of timing, on which the protection have pounced: Sokola has famous that the condo the place all this occurred was on Crosby Road in Soho, However because the protection will doubtless level out , property information present that Weinstein solely bought the Crosby Road condo in Could 2005, when he was going by means of a divorce. In 2002, his main residence was the duplex condo on Central Park West he shared together with his then-wife, Eve.
An assistant to photographer Marco Glaviano who’d met Sokola in Milan has sworn out an affidavit (which received some press again in 2022) that remembers a day in 2005, when she was working at Glaviano’s hybrid office-residence in New York’s CitySpire constructing. She and Kaja Sokola have been staying right here, Sokola admits on the stand. Glaviano’s assistant, one Helga Rose Samuelsen, remembers trying up from her laptop and being shocked by the sight of her 19-year-old aspiring-actress pal ushering Weinstein into the condo, after which: “into her room.” The assistant felt certain the 2 may have solely lately met. But Sokola denied final week she’d even seen Harvey Weinstein that calendar 12 months, stating, “That by no means occurred.”
As well as, prosecutors may produce no emails or cellphone information proving these two knew one another earlier than 2005. Weinstein maintains that Sokola was an acquaintance of simply seven years, tops.
In the meantime, neither of Sokola’s prior civil lawsuits talked about the crime that Weinstein is now being accused of, specifically the alleged 2006 sexual assault on the Tribeca Grand. In her 2018 class motion, Sokola mentioned that Weinstein had invited her as much as his lodge room after the lunch however that she had “refused, giving the excuse that she couldn’t go away her sister.” In 2025, that story has a brand new ending, which shall be key to the prosecution’s revised general case. Weinstein attorneys, then again, are seizing on the inconsistencies, the crimson meat of any protection.
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The protection’s technique shall be to name Sokola’s credibility into query by highlighting discrepancies in her testimony through the years, and by pointing to her struggles with alcoholism and psychological well being. Assistant D.A. Lucey acknowledged these issues in her opening assertion, conceding that Sokola is somebody who “takes one step ahead and, sadly, two steps again.” However she’s arguing that Sokola’s historical past doesn’t change the info of the case.
Sokola can also be now going through an array of child-custody points in the USA and in Poland that have already got impacted her look on this trial. In 2022, Sokola’s husband — who lives in Poland — filed a petition in federal court docket demanding the return of their sole youngster, whom he says she absconded with to New York Metropolis that January. In September 26, 2024, a call towards her in a divorce motion Sokola started in Poland awarded full custody of her one youngster to her husband till their divorce resolves. But the registration of this short-term custody order from Poland (the place the kid and Sokola are residents)—normally an expedited course of—has been delayed for months by New York Metropolis Household Court docket. The husband’s lawyer, Michael S. Pascazi, believes the matter was intentionally slow-walked so Sokola may stay within the U.S.
The day earlier than the Weinstein indictment was unveiled, the District decide overseeing the husband’s case dominated that the kid may keep right here in the USA, citing the husband’s alleged bodily and psychological abuse of Sokola (and, in a vastly restricted capability, her son), in addition to this husband’s felony historical past in France and elsewhere.
However neither the protection nor the prosecution has talked about that Sokola threatened suicide proper across the time she gave grand-jury testimony, in August 2024. These incidents, and the involvement of alcohol, induced her to lose custody of her youngster to a foster caretaker for the following few months.
Sokola has utilized for asylum in the USA on the grounds that she and the kid have been “victims of violence.” That utility continues to be pending.
In opening arguments for the Weinstein trial, prosecutors introduced Sokola was now in competition for one thing known as a U visa. The U visa is “supposed for victims of sure crimes who’ve suffered psychological or bodily abuse and are useful to regulation enforcement or authorities officers within the investigation or prosecution of felony exercise,” in keeping with the USA authorities net web page on the subject. Requested about this on the stand final week, Sokola conceded that below this program, if one reported against the law and cooperated with prosecutors, these prosecutors may fill out a type supporting one’s utility for a U visa to stay in the USA. She agreed that if her asylum utility just isn’t granted, that U Visa utility could be “depending on the District Lawyer’s assist.” The Manhattan District Lawyer’s workplace and Sokola’s legal professional Lindsay Goldbrum at Goddard Legislation declined touch upon the U visa’s affect on this case.
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After her 2019 civil lawsuit, during which she was the only real named plaintiff, Sokola billed herself as “probably the most public faces of the Me Too motion” on one in all her skilled web sites. It seems she was first interviewed in 2020 within the Polish press as an alleged sufferer of Weinstein, and once more, two years after that, for a 2022 Rolling Stone profile, her story then bouncing round main media. That 12 months she walked the crimson carpet at each the New York and Los Angeles premieres of the Weinstein-scandal film She Mentioned.
She has blogged about her troubles and addictions on a (now eliminated) Polish-language web site that additionally marketed her providers as therapist. The posts reveal a lady disenchanted to haven’t achieved spektakularnych sukcesów—spectacular success, a phrase used greater than as soon as.
Prosecutor Shannon Lucey portrays Sokola as a product of her upbringing: Sokola’s mom and sister enter her at 14 in a modeling contest she wins, having fun with their bragging rights to having a “pageant princess” and profitable mannequin within the gene pool. And alongside comes Harvey Weinstein, together with his ostensibly credible So that you wanna be within the films? spiel.
In response to Sokola’s weblog, Modeling was at all times only a stepping stone. Her dream, she mentioned, was at all times to jot down and act: “Once I left for the US 100 years in the past, I used to be thirsty for all that America has to supply, a high-speed profession, spectacular success, and the happiness that comes with being within the limelight,” she wrote.
Harvey Weinstein “knew how addictive Hollywood desires have been,” mentioned the prosecutor on opening day, because the defendant assiduously averted eye contact with the jury.
Sokola had determined to forego college in 2006 so as to get traction as an actor. She says her professor mom advised her it was the “dumbest determination of [her] life” and gave her the silent remedy. (A supply near the household says that’s not true.) She says that Weinstein, together with his speak of performing, “was this anchor” of an individual who nonetheless believed in her, “actually seeing the potential.”
Across the time of Sokola’s twentieth birthday, her older sister Ewa handed by means of city. Sokola hoped that after lunching along with her and Weinstein, Ewa “wouldn’t deal with me like a joke,” she mentioned. However then, Ewa, “being the superb heart specialist that she is,” advised Weinstein he’d do effectively to drop some weight for the sake of his well being, additionally questioning aloud why European actresses appeared so ill-used in American movies.
Sokola had hoped Ewa would relay to their mom that, with such a robust ally within the enterprise, Sokola had an opportunity to make it. She says she by no means advised any relations concerning the assault she now alleges came about minutes later within the upstairs lodge room.
Within the days that adopted, Weinstein despatched alongside some outdated movies on DVD for Sokola to observe to additional her training, accompanied by a heat birthday card the place he misspells her identify—with a “Y.” She didn’t rip it up; the household had hung onto it, and it was offered at court docket. Sokola appeared reluctant to confess on the stand that it was Weinstein who had a senior VP at his firm write her a suggestion the next month for the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Movie Institute. She now claims she was unable to afford the quoted $3,000 tuition on this interval.
In November 2011, the 25-year-old Sokola emailed Barbara Schneeweiss, a principal assistant to Weinstein and artistic govt on the Weinstein Firm. In fractured English, Sokola mentioned she was seeking to be related with an agent. Schneeweiss forwarded the request onto Weinstein who replied with distinct under-enthusiasm, “Get out of this in a pleasant approach.”
“Her profession by no means received to the following stage, and she or he’s blaming him,” mentioned Weinstein legal professional Aidala in opening arguments.
“He by no means accomplished something to assist me get my foot within the door,” Sokola testified final week, plainly enraged, voice raised. “After a few years of, as I felt, being fooled by Mr. Weinstein, I ended believing that I can do [acting].”
Sokola mentioned on the stand that “performing was a ardour since I used to be a baby,” however a supply near the household experiences no stabs made at any performing in Poland. (Although she gained a couple of certificates for dramatic recitations of poetry, introductions to a significant drama college there have been rejected out of hand.) Being “well-known” was a preoccupation. Her diaries are being fought over within the courtroom, what can come into proof. A supply near the household suggests they include speak of Jeffrey Epstein’s island — and little that’s damning about Weinstein.
Sokola was requested in court docket a couple of part of the diaries courting from 2015, dedicated to conditions and traumas she’s skilled with numerous people. Her “trauma” skilled by the hands of Harvey Weinstein, she’d written, was “promising me assist and nothing got here of it.” However the traumas she’d listed for 2 different males have been, respectively, “rape, bodily aggressive” in a single case, and in one other, “forcing intercourse.”
In 2022, Sokola advised in Rolling Stone that Weinstein had mentioned he had an element for her in a film “with an enormous actress, a ginormous film.” At trial, she acts observably put out remembering this gig someday within the spring of 2006 — as an additional on The Nanny Diaries: “It was bittersweet…a possibility, I suppose, to see how an enormous film set operates. [But] not a position-role.” The scene wound up reduce from the film.
A 2011 e mail to Weinstein kicks off, “I keep in mind you point out me about [Annapurna Pictures CEO] megan ellison. May I get in contact along with her now?” Sokola talks up a “thriller drama about intercourse slavery” she needs to supply. She tells Weinstein about “my quick damaged drems [sic]” and writes that she’s feeling “a lot stronger after coping with my weak point,” an allusion she says in court docket to “psychological well being issues.” (A teal-colored enamel ribbon pin worn daily on Sokola’s collar alerts her assist for these affected by psychological sickness.)
“I wished him to be trustworthy with me,” she mentioned from the stand, “and if he mentioned that I had potential, that I had reward, that I had abilities, to show it by introducing me to casting administrators, nothing else.” She raised her voice angrily: “I wished honesty from Mr. Harvey Weinstein and by no means received it and it was heartbreaking….He broke my desires and my vanity and my belief and perception in myself.”
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Not lengthy after Sokola’s look earlier than the grand jury in the summertime of 2024, disaster nearly imperiled the D.A.’s case.
Court docket paperwork hooked up to the federal child-abduction case point out police have been summoned to Sokola’s condo downtown twice within the week earlier than her look in court docket. Sokola, who had allegedly been consuming alcohol, was hauled off to a psychiatric facility and misplaced custody of her youngster to foster take care of the following few months, in keeping with a bench order issued by New York Metropolis Household Court docket.
Sokola the truth is has a big historical past of psychiatric hospitalizations, each in Manhattan and in Poland, as documented in information hooked up to the federal-court filings by her estranged husband.
The information date from February 2007 and are available from Sokola’s doctor-sister, Ewa. Sokola’s attorneys object in a filed response to Ewa’s having “circulated, with out permission, [Sokola’s] medical information”, however don’t dispute their veracity, as a substitute mentioning these information predate the wedding and so are irrelevant to the motion.
Amongst different revelations, these information recount an incident when a extremely intoxicated Sokola, 20 years of age and preventing with a good friend, hurled a rubbish bag from the window of her East Village condo constructing, a 911 name alerting police. Within the ensuing report from Cabrini Medical Heart’s psychiatric-emergency service (the place Sokola was taken by ambulance for analysis) she was recognized with “bipolar persona traits.”
In years that adopted, different official experiences element admissions voluntary and involuntary to psychiatric hospitals and an habit heart, citing anorexia and bulimia (from age 14), cuts on the wrist she denies are any suicide try, an “emotionally unstable persona of the borderline sort,” “dangerous alcohol use with addictive options,” and a affected person who has “undergone personal cleansing a number of instances.”
A 2011 questionnaire accomplished by her retired-professor mom in Poland requesting drug-treatment protection for Sokola from that nation’s authorities talked about a suspected suicide try by Sokola preceded by farewell emails and speak of her personal funeral. Sokola had been coaching intermittently to be a psychologist however had hardly left the home for months, her mom said, blaming Sokola’s modeling years, the “easy accessibility to alcohol and nightlife in lots of the world’s capitals.”
After her 2015 marriage to a businessman inside days of assembly him in individual off an interplay on Fb, she went sober, even when the connection finally implodes spectacularly in 2022.
In late 2024, two of Sokola’s siblings filed startling written declarations to federal court docket. Sokola’s a lot older half-sister, Hania, claimed Sokola invited her to come back to New York in the summertime of 2022 —shortly earlier than Sokola would go public on the Weinstein matter—to assist her dry out. Hania reported that Sokola was consuming to extra, usually handed out to the purpose she couldn’t be woke up, her younger youngster scrambling round her condo with the home windows open. There is no such thing as a response to the particulars of Hania’s assertion in a filed response by Sokola’s federal-case attorneys. Whereas refusing to touch upon something particularly, in a letter to The Hollywood Reporter, Sokola’s private legal professional, Lindsay Goldbrum, mentioned that such particulars “don’t have any bearing on the actual query posed by Mr. Weinstein’s retrial: whether or not he sexually assaulted Ms. Sokola in 2006.”
In one in all her a number of declarations to the New York federal court docket (and likewise in testimony to Poland’s Household Court docket), Sokola’s heart specialist sister Ewa maintained she, too, was invited to stick with Sokola in August of 2024 to assist her dry out (they’d each be testifying earlier than the grand jury), and that she introduced the withdrawal drug baclofen and IV-drip gear in her baggage. In a single declaration, Ewa states she was current within the condo on August 27, 2024, when she witnessed her inebriated sister being cuffed by law enforcement officials for her personal safety after threatening to leap from the high-rise balcony. Ewa additionally relates the goings-on that day to police in a cellphone video capturing sister Kaja being put in handcuffs. (The video was seen by the Hollywood Reporter.) A New York Metropolis Household Court docket bench order from August 28 mentions police and emergency personnel eradicating Sokola to a hospital for psychiatric analysis.
The bench order additionally directed the elimination of Sokola’s five-year-old to foster care, deeming the kid “uncared for” and confirming Sokola’s newest “psychiatric hospitalization,” in addition to the presence of police “because of the mom consuming alcohol and expressing suicidal ideation in entrance of the kid.”
In court docket papers that fall arguing the federal continuing launched by Sokola’s estranged husband shouldn’t be re-opened, Sokola’s attorneys had claimed her admitted “relapse into misuse of alcohol…and short-term psychological well being decline thereafter” was irrelevant to the query of whether or not it might be higher for her youngster to be repatriated to Poland and his father. These ominous well being points are “not admitted” by Sokola in her response, although she acknowledges she is “actively participating in common out-patient restoration packages and is making good progress” and “continues to have common entry to [her child].”
A particular settlement with ACS round Thanksgiving decided the kid needs to be returned to Sokola.
“God rattling, I really feel like a crappy guardian so usually,” Sokola posted on Fb at Christmastime in 2024.
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Legal costs associated to the alleged 2002 incident may have been introduced any time after August 2019, given the passage that month of New York’s Youngster Victims Act extending abused minors a 12 months’s grace in coming ahead. However the State, up to now, has by no means charged Weinstein with the alleged Youngster Victims Act offense.
The one incident Weinstein is as we speak charged with regarding Sokola was not a part of both of her prior two civil-lawsuit filings. The story is derived from a truncated unique model in an early lawsuit, and an allegation first showing in personal 2021 paperwork for the chapter continuing settlement. Sokola’s lawyer Lindsay Goldbrum admits, “she has beforehand chosen to not publicly share this painful portion of her expertise.”
She met remotely twice with the D.A.’s workplace after Weinstein’s first trial had already commenced. And a few notes have been taken—none by the police detective within the room—with no police investigation then instigated. The Manhattan District Lawyer and Sokola’s legal professional Lindsay Goldbrum had no remark.
“I simply wished to share what occurred,” is how Sokola explains these conferences on the stand. She admits that “not in my wildest desires” had she ever contemplated testifying in a felony continuing towards Harvey Weinstein. However right here we’re.