Weinstein pushed for three months after raping me, Model says

A Norwegian model and actress testified Wednesday that Harvey Weinstein raped her after the 2008 British Academy of Film and Television Awards and then “tricked” her into entering a New York hotel room just months later before he forced her to pushed for a threesome.

The model, identified in court as Natassia M., told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury that while she had met Weinstein on several occasions, she was shocked in 2008 to find the producer banging on her London hotel room. Concerned that her publicist, who lives down the hall, might hear, she quickly opened the door and said Weinstein “just barged in” before making an ominous statement.

“He said, ‘No one becomes like an A-lister unless it goes through me,'” Natassia M. said Wednesday. “I was just so scared of this guy, he had so much power… he embodied the movie business.”

Describing how “everyone had to go through him” to be successful in Hollywood, Natassia M. said Weinstein took off his pants and pushed her onto a bed before raping her. She said the rape didn’t last long because she “played dead” and Weinstein “ejaculated into his hand” and left immediately.

Too scared to go to the police, she said she tried to figure out how to overcome the attack and even reached out to Weinstein in April 2008 to provide a recording of her voice for an audition. When she went to drop off the CD at Weinstein’s office, she said, the producer replied that she should drop the CD off at his assistant’s at the Peninsula Hotel — and raised the idea of ​​a threesome.

“I’m not the type for a threesome, I’m just not wired that way. I said I don’t want a handkerchief. I told him that,” Natassia M. testified.

However, when she went to the New York hotel, she said she was escorted to a hotel room by an assistant, where she immediately saw Weinstein and another woman in the room. Crying in the stands, Natassia M. described how “angry” she was to see the other woman, saying they were both “trying to get me to have a threesome with him.”

“He’s got you by the f***ing throat, knowing that if you don’t comply…your career is down the drain, knowing that this thing you’ve been working on for months…. And that’s not right,” she added. She explained that she was trying to “manage the situation” because she wanted the film part.

Natassia M. added that during the incident, the other woman in the room told her “she’s so shy” before laughing with Weinstein — and “gave him a blowjob.” During cross-examination, the model said she put on a robe because she felt obligated to attend and watch Weinstein having sex with the other woman.

The harrowing reality of Weinstein’s far-reaching power in Hollywood is at the center of prosecutors’ case against the 70-year-old in Los Angeles. In his second trial for sex crimes — he’s already a convicted rapist — Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to seven counts after prosecutors allege he assaulted four women between 2003 and 2014.

Weinstein had previously been convicted of similar crimes in a 2020 New York trial.

While Natassia M.’s allegations against Weinstein aren’t part of the criminal case against him, she is among several supporting witnesses tasked with helping prosecutors prove he’s a serial killer. Like several women who testified before her, Natassia M. spent most of Wednesday morning describing to jurors how Weinstein attacked her — and how she felt she had no choice but to remain silent and face the abuse to forget to save her own career.

She described how after the February 2008 rape — during which she said she just looked at her bed covers and “froze to death” — she didn’t even think about going to the police and instead told her boyfriend, the director David Nutter, told.

“Because if you’re an actress and you’re a problem, you’re not working. When you’re difficult, word goes around Hollywood that that person is difficult,” she noted. The model also noted at the time of the attack that she weighed 98 pounds and remembered Weinstein [her] of a boar.”

During cross-examination, Weinstein’s attorney, Mark Werksman, questioned Natassia M. about the details of the 2008 rape and asked her if she had been vocal in saying that she “didn’t want to have sex that night.”

“You didn’t say no or got up off my bed, you said I don’t do the casting couch thing,” Werksman added, prompting Natassia M. to agree.

“I didn’t fight him, I didn’t hit him, I didn’t kick him off me, the things that later in my mind I thought I should have done,” she later added.

Defense attorneys also grilled her about the Peninsula incident, asking her why she followed Weinstein’s assistant to the hotel room and if she was asked to be the three of them.

“I wasn’t asked…he was planning to put me in an awkward position to humiliate me, I thought,” Natassia M. said. “It was more like blackmail…he just wants you to comply.”

The model also admitted to meeting Weinstein several times over the years, and that the producer had put her in awkward situations during many of those meetings. In one encounter, she said Weinstein tried to force her friend to perform oral sex on him – prompting Natassia M. to stand up for her friend and bear the brunt of his attack.

She said Weinstein took her to another room where he masturbated while touching her. The encounter, she said, was “demeaning and demeaning.”

Years after the attack, Natassia M. said she saw Weinstein at an Oscar party at Soho House, where Nicole Kidman and Lady Gaga were also present. She said Weinstein pulled her aside and asked her why she hadn’t “gone to the tabloids” about their past encounters.

In response, she said she told Weinstein she would never do that and was “playing around with the most powerful guy in Hollywood.”

Weinstein, she said, replied simply, “It pays to be my friend.”