The model had arrived in New York City just days before in 2002. She had left her family behind in Poland and come across the world with hopes of becoming a star.
Then she met Harvey Weinstein.
The model, Kaja Sokola, was 16, and Mr. Weinstein was a 50-year-old producer when they met at a club and he got her phone number, Ms. Sokola told a Manhattan jury on Thursday.
He invited her to lunch to talk about her aspirations in movies, she recalled. Instead, he took her to his apartment in SoHo, where he forced her to masturbate him in a bathroom as he touched her.
On Thursday, more than 20 years later, Ms. Sokola recounted that day in court for the first time, at times breaking into sobs. Mr. Weinstein sat at the defense table, listening with his head resting on his hand.
After that encounter, Mr. Weinstein assaulted her several more times in the early 2000s, Ms. Sokola said. The incident that she described occurring she was a minor is too old to be the subject of criminal charges. But four years later, Ms. Sokola said, she was in New York for work and had gone with her older sister to a midday meeting with Mr. Weinstein when he brought her to a hotel room and sexually assaulted her.
That incident is part of a criminal case against Mr. Weinstein being heard in a retrial that began last month. Mr. Weinstein is charged with committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree against Ms. Sokola, one of three women whom prosecutors say he attacked.
In 2020, Mr. Weinstein, 73, was convicted of sex crimes in New York and sentenced to 23 years in prison. But the state’s highest court last year overturned the decision. The judges found that prosecutors should not have been allowed to call as witnesses women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, but whose accusations were not the basis for any charges.
Mr. Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to the new set of charges and his lawyers insist that his interactions with the women were consensual. He has been convicted of similar charges in California and sentenced to 16 years in prison there. He is appealing that case.
Mr. Weinstein has faced years of legal trouble after accusations against him set off the global #MeToo movement. The man behind “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love,” he was known for making the careers of Hollywood stars. He also wielded his power to harass and sexually assault women, many of whom were young and trying to make it in the industry, according to dozens of women who came forward.
Prosecutors argue that Mr. Weinstein used his influence to exert “enormous control” and sexually assault not only Ms. Sokola but also Jessica Mann, an aspiring actress who said Mr. Weinstein attacked her in 2013, and Miriam Haley, a former television production assistant who said he assaulted her in 2006. Ms. Haley took the stand against Mr. Weinstein last week.
Like Ms. Haley, Ms. Sokola had met Mr. Weinstein as she was looking for work in New York and thought the producer could open doors.
In the spring of 2006, just before Ms. Sokola’s 20th birthday, Mr. Weinstein joined her and her older sister around lunchtime, she said. He had just helped her get a role as an extra in the movie “The Nanny Diaries,” which she thought might signify a “change of pattern” for Mr. Weinstein. She thought that perhaps he truly saw her potential, she said. And if Mr. Weinstein believed in her, then her mother and sister, who had looked down on her acting aspirations, might take her seriously, she told the jury.
After about half an hour of conversation, Mr. Weinstein asked Ms. Sokola to accompany him to a hotel room so she could look at a script, she said. Once they entered the room, she said, he pushed her until she fell backward onto a bed. She couldn’t move, she told the jurors, as Mr. Weinstein’s weight pinned her down. He took off her boots, ripped off her stockings and removed her underwear, she said.
“My soul was removed from me,” she told the jury.
Mr. Weinstein ignored her pleas to stop and forced his mouth onto her vagina, she said. She said it appeared that Mr. Weinstein was masturbating.
When he stopped, Ms. Sokola recalled, he said: “You see? That wasn’t too difficult.”
Ms. Sokola testified that she left the hotel room and went back to meet her sister, whom she did not tell about the assault.
“I never shared it with anyone,” she said. “I blamed myself for things that happened — most of all my stupidity to put myself in a situation like this.”
Ms. Sokola’s sister, Ewa Sokola, testified on Wednesday that her sister had returned after about half an hour, “acting tense.”
Later, Kaja Sokola testified, she received a box of movies and a birthday card from Mr. Weinstein bearing the message “Happy birthday to someone with a real zest for life.”
Inside the card was a note from Mr. Weinstein saying that he had sent the gift to “improve your movie knowledge and help you become a movie lover.”
That June, Ms. Sokola said, she saw Mr. Weinstein at an event and took a picture with him. When asked by a prosecutor, Shannon Lucey, whether she had said anything to him then about what had occurred in the hotel room, she said she had not.
“I’m 39 years old now and I know what I would do now,” she said. “Back then, I was 19.”
Ms. Sokola testified that she had communicated with Mr. Weinstein in the following years, sometimes trying to find work. When news broke about the extensive allegations against him, she reached out to a lawyer, she said.
In 2019, Ms. Sokola sued Mr. Weinstein and two film companies under the Child Victims Act, a New York law that opened a one-year window allowing sexual abuse victims of any age to take legal action no matter how long ago an incident occurred. The suit was settled for $3 million, she said.
She also received about $475,000 from a settlement fund established in the bankruptcy of Mr. Weinstein’s company.
She decided to testify against Mr. Weinstein after the Manhattan district attorney’s office contacted her last year, she said.
“What happened to me when I was a kid myself, I never really looked at it the right way,” Ms. Sokola said. She said her views changed when she had a son.
“I would like to show him power and strength and resilience,” she said.
Susan C. Beachy contributed research.