It’s the sequel nobody anticipated. Harvey Weinstein is being retried for alleged intercourse crimes in opposition to 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 expenses suffered a uncommon overturn precisely a yr 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 might show essential. 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 certainly one of 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 enchantment was the prosecution’s parade of Molineux witnesses—a lineup of three ladies recounting prior unhealthy 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 at the least another feminine who might be tied to formal expenses 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 contemporary face would spur greater information protection, actually.
Watching Harvey Weinstein’s sex-crimes conviction get overturned absolutely rankled the Manhattan D.A.’s workplace. The mortally sick film producer might have been dispatched to Los Angeles to start his 16-year sentence for his rape conviction there as he awaits outcomes of his enchantment on that case. However Bragg is up for re-election, and taking Weinstein down might assist wipe latest recollections of acquitted subway vigilante Daniel Penny and hush-money backhander Donald Trump slipping by way of the Workplace’s fingers. Bragg himself sat second row as Assistant District Legal professional Shannon Lucey staked the federal government’s revised case in opposition to 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 must be again at Rikers Island jail as an alternative 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 way from open-shut. And along with the alleged 2006 assault in opposition to Sokola for which Weinstein has been formally indicted, prosecutors seem like relying, as they did final time, on stunning accounts of one other assault for which Weinstein is just not being charged.
All of which is to say, he might beat this rap. Once more.
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It was spring 2006 when Weinstein took a hurried lunch on the Tribeca Grand Lodge’s restaurant with the practically 20-year-old Sokola and her heart specialist sister, who was visiting. Prosecutors say Sokola needed 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 immediately informed Sokola he needed to go. However there was a script in his lodge room he needed 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 pressured 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 prison 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 quite a variety: “from on or about April 29, 2006, to on or about Might 6, 2006.”
The yr of the alleged assault Weinstein finds himself charged with right now — 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 are usually not 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 remains to be coping with right now.”
Prosecutors are alleging Sokola had met Weinstein earlier that yr at a dinner at then-happening NoHo restaurant Butter, the form of place the place employed promoters imported fashions to return “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 swimsuit the place she was “Jane Doe,” she claimed that Weinstein had pressured her to offer 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 tip of 2019, Sokola exited from the preliminary class-action swimsuit, citing “inadequate compensation for the victims” amongst different issues. In a second civil lawsuit, from 2019 along with her title 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 underneath strain to make all of it go away. (Sokola had earlier acquired an extra 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 total particulars of which had but to be made public.)
As lurid because the declare of sexual assault in opposition to a minor could also be, prosecutors within the ongoing prison trial have declined to cost Weinstein for the alleged 2002 encounter, maybe on account of such inconsistencies of timing, on which the protection have pounced: Sokola has famous that the condominium the place all this occurred was on Crosby Road in Soho, However because the protection will doubtless level out , property data present that Weinstein solely bought the Crosby Road condominium in Might 2005, when he was going by way of a divorce. In 2002, his major residence was the duplex condominium 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 wanting up from her pc and being surprised by the sight of her 19-year-old aspiring-actress pal ushering Weinstein into the condominium, after which: “into her room.” The assistant felt certain the 2 might have solely not too long ago met. But Sokola denied final week she’d even seen Harvey Weinstein that calendar yr, stating, “That by no means occurred.”
As well as, prosecutors might produce no emails or telephone data 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 will probably be key to the prosecution’s revised general case. Weinstein attorneys, alternatively, are seizing on the inconsistencies, the purple meat of any protection.
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The protection’s technique will probably be to name Sokola’s credibility into query by highlighting discrepancies in her testimony over time, 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 information of the case.
Sokola can be now dealing with 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 courtroom demanding the return of their sole baby, whom he says she absconded with to New York Metropolis that January. In September 26, 2024, a call in opposition to her in a divorce motion Sokola started in Poland awarded full custody of her one baby to her husband till their divorce resolves. But the registration of this non permanent 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 might 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 might 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 prison 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 baby 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 remains to be pending.
In opening arguments for the Weinstein trial, prosecutors introduced Sokola was now in rivalry for one thing referred to as a U visa. The U visa is “meant 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 prison exercise,” in accordance with the USA authorities internet web page on the subject. Requested about this on the stand final week, Sokola conceded that underneath this program, if one reported a criminal offense and cooperated with prosecutors, these prosecutors might fill out a type supporting one’s utility for a U visa to stay in the USA. She agreed that if her asylum utility is just not granted, that U Visa utility could be “depending on the District Legal professional’s assist.” The Manhattan District Legal professional’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, by which she was the only real named plaintiff, Sokola billed herself as “some of the public faces of the Me Too motion” on certainly one of 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 yr she walked the purple carpet at each the New York and Los Angeles premieres of the Weinstein-scandal film She Stated.
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 disillusioned 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.
Based on Sokola’s weblog, Modeling was all the time only a stepping stone. Her dream, she mentioned, was all the time 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 informed her it was the “dumbest choice 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 way 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 wonderful heart specialist that she is,” informed 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 informed any members of the family concerning the assault she now alleges happened 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 schooling, accompanied by a heat birthday card the place he misspells her title—with a “Y.” She didn’t rip it up; the household had hung onto it, and it was offered at courtroom. Sokola appeared reluctant to confess on the stand that it was Weinstein who had a senior VP at his firm write her a advice 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 government on the Weinstein Firm. In fractured English, Sokola mentioned she was trying to be linked with an agent. Schneeweiss forwarded the request onto Weinstein who replied with distinct under-enthusiasm, “Get out of this in a pleasant means.”
“Her profession by no means received to the following degree, and he or she’s blaming him,” mentioned Weinstein legal professional Aidala in opening arguments.
“He by no means performed 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 finished 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 reviews no stabs made at any performing in Poland. (Although she received a couple of certificates for dramatic recitations of poetry, introductions to a significant drama faculty 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 courtroom a few part of the diaries courting from 2015, dedicated to conditions and traumas she’s skilled with varied 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 informed 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 chance, I assume, 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 spot,” an allusion she says in courtroom to “psychological well being issues.” (A teal-colored enamel ribbon pin worn day-after-day on Sokola’s collar alerts her assist for these affected by psychological sickness.)
“I needed him to be sincere with me,” she mentioned from the stand, “and if he mentioned that I had potential, that I had reward, that I had skills, to show it by introducing me to casting administrators, nothing else.” She raised her voice angrily: “I needed 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 virtually 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 condominium downtown twice within the week earlier than her look in courtroom. Sokola, who had allegedly been consuming alcohol, was hauled off to a psychiatric facility and misplaced custody of her baby to foster take care of the following few months, in accordance with a bench order issued by New York Metropolis Household Court docket.
Sokola in reality has a major historical past of psychiatric hospitalizations, each in Manhattan and in Poland, as documented in data hooked up to the federal-court filings by her estranged husband.
The data 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 data”, however don’t dispute their veracity, as an alternative mentioning these data predate the wedding and so are irrelevant to the motion.
Amongst different revelations, these data recount an incident when a extremely intoxicated Sokola, 20 years of age and combating with a good friend, hurled a rubbish bag from the window of her East Village condominium 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 character traits.”
In years that adopted, different official reviews 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 character of the borderline sort,” “dangerous alcohol use with addictive options,” and a affected person who has “undergone personal detoxing 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 most 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 courtroom. Sokola’s a lot older half-sister, Hania, claimed Sokola invited her to return 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 baby scrambling round her condominium 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 “haven’t any bearing on the true query posed by Mr. Weinstein’s retrial: whether or not he sexually assaulted Ms. Sokola in 2006.”
In certainly one of her a number of declarations to the New York federal courtroom (and in addition 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 tools in her baggage. In a single declaration, Ewa states she was current within the condominium on August 27, 2024, when she witnessed her inebriated sister being cuffed by cops 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 considered 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 “as a result of mom consuming alcohol and expressing suicidal ideation in entrance of the kid.”
In courtroom 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 non permanent psychological well being decline thereafter” was irrelevant to the query of whether or not it could be higher for her baby 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 partaking in common out-patient restoration applications and is making good progress” and “continues to have common entry to [her child].”
A particular settlement with ACS round Thanksgiving decided the kid must be returned to Sokola.
“God rattling, I really feel like a crappy father or mother so usually,” Sokola posted on Fb at Christmastime in 2024.
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Legal expenses associated to the alleged 2002 incident might have been introduced any time after August 2019, given the passage that month of New York’s Little one Victims Act extending abused minors a yr’s grace in coming ahead. However the State, thus far, has by no means charged Weinstein with the alleged Little one Victims Act offense.
The only incident Weinstein is right now charged with regarding Sokola was not a part of both of her prior two civil-lawsuit filings. The story is derived from a truncated authentic 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 Legal professional and Sokola’s legal professional Lindsay Goldbrum had no remark.
“I simply needed 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 prison continuing in opposition to Harvey Weinstein. However right here we’re.