Annabella Sciorra: Harvey Weinstein held me down, raped me

NEW YORK (AP) — A ctress Annabella Sciorra confronted Harvey Weinstein from a witness stand Thursday, her voice quivering as she recounted a rape accusation she kept largely private for decades.

“I was punching him. I was kicking him. I was just trying to get him off of me" after he pushed his way into her apartment and pinned her on a bed in the early 1990s, Sciorra told the jury. She said he overpowered her, seizing her hands and holding them over her head, and raped her.

“I didn’t have very much fight left inside me,” Sciorra testified. “My body shut down. It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake in a way that was very unusual. I didn’t even know what was happening. It was like a seizure or something.”

When she ran into him about a month later and confronted him about what had happened, he parried, “That’s what all the nice Catholic girls say," she testified.

Then, she said, he leaned toward her and said menacingly: “This remains between you and I.”

“I thought he was going to hit me right there,” Sciorra said.

For more than a quarter-century, she told her story only a few people close to her about the encounter, until she came forward publicly in 2017.

Now, Sciorra has become the first of Weinstein's accusers to testify at his New York City rape trial, seen as a watershed for the #MeToo movement.

The New York trial involves just a pair of the dozens of allegations that surfaced against Weinstein in recent years. He is charged with forcibly performing oral sex on former “Project Runway” production assistant Mimi Haleyi in his apartment in 2006 and raping an aspiring actress in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.

Weinstein has insisted any sexual encounters were consensual. As he left court on Wednesday, he told reporters...