Sciorra, who is known for her work in “The Sopranos,” has publicly accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in her Gramercy Park apartment in 1993, but the incident was too old to be prosecuted under state law.
Now, however, the Manhattan district attorney has obtained a new indictment from a grand jury that will let Sciorra tell her story on the witness stand under the legal theory that her testimony will support charges of predatory sexual assault, even though her alleged encounter with the producer happened too long ago to be charged separately as rape, prosecutors said.
Weinstein, 67, once one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers, pleaded not guilty to the new indictment in state Supreme Court in Manhattan on Monday. He maintains his sexual encounters with Sciorra and two other women were consensual.
Justice James M. Burke postponed the trial until Jan. 6 to allow Weinstein to respond to the new indictment.
After the hearing, Weinstein’s lead defense lawyer, Donna Rotunno, speaking on the courthouse steps, called the new indictment a last-minute maneuver by prosecutors who “are desperate.”
“I think it shows the strength of our case, frankly, that the DA went to the grand jury in the eleventh hour,” Rotunno said. “The case itself is weak, and they feel like they need this portion to help.”
But the lead prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon, said the changes to the indictment were designed to remedy a legal obstacle to adding Sciorra to the case that Burke highlighted in a ruling earlier this month.
The judge had said Sciorra’s evidence was not admissible because the first grand jury had not heard it, so in the last week, the district attorney’s office presented her testimony to a new grand jury, which voted to amend the indictment.
Illuzzi-Orbon said Monday that there was “nothing new” in the charging document and that Weinstein’s defense lawyers were aware of Sciorra’s allegations.
“There are absolutely no surprises here,” she told the court.
The heart of the charges against Weinstein remains the testimony of two other accusers: an unidentified woman who told police that Weinstein overpowered her in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan in March 2013, and Mimi Haleyi, a production assistant, who said Weinstein forcibly held her down and performed oral sex on her at his Manhattan apartment in 2006.
The predatory sexual assault charges require prosecutors to prove that Weinstein committed a serious sexual assault against at least two women. The charge carries a life sentence.
Gloria Allred, a California lawyer who represents Sciorra, said her client “is looking forward to a just result.”
Sciorra, who first shared her story in 2017 with The New Yorker, said that Weinstein had dropped her off at her apartment in Gramercy Park after a film industry dinner in New York. The producer later appeared at her door, she told the magazine, and pushed his way into her apartment.
Sciorra said Weinstein cornered her into her bedroom even though she protested. She said he shoved her onto the bed, raped her and then performed oral sex on her, according to the magazine.
“I struggled, but I had very little strength left in me,” she told The New Yorker.
Illuzzi-Orbon has said that Sciorra did not speak with prosecutors until after the initial grand jury had concluded its work last year.
Last year, Weinstein initially faced charges involving three women. But in October, Burke dismissed one of those counts after prosecutors acknowledged that a detective failed to tell them about a witness who cast doubt on one of Weinstein’s accusers, Lucia Evans. Evans, a marketing executive, told investigators that the producer had forced her to perform oral sex on him in his TriBeCa office in 2004.
Besides the victims mentioned in the updated indictment, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office is also expected to call on three other women to testify about Weinstein’s “prior bad acts” to establish a pattern of behavior for a person prosecutors have described as a sexual predator. Prosecutors in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, followed that strategy in the sexual assault trial of comedian Bill Cosby, who was convicted and sentenced to prison.
In the Weinstein case, one of the women will testify that the producer assaulted her on a spring evening in 2004 at a midtown Manhattan hotel near Park Avenue, a court document showed.
A second woman will tell the jury about an assault that she said happened in a SoHo apartment where Weinstein had lived previously. The incident occurred between May and July in 2005, the document said.
A third woman is expected to testify that the producer attacked her on Feb. 19, 2013, inside a hotel in Beverly Hills, California, the document said. The time and place of that incident are strikingly similar to an alleged rape described to The Los Angeles Times in 2017 by an Italian model and actress.
The actress, who has not been identified, told the newspaper that Weinstein showed up at her room in the Beverly Hills Hotel after a film festival, without warning, and “bullied his way” into her room.
“He grabbed me by the hair and forced me to do something I did not want to do,” she told the paper. “He then dragged me to the bathroom and forcibly raped me.”
A lawyer for the woman did not immediately return requests for comment.
This article originally appeared in
.