A Norwegian model and actress testified on Wednesday that Harvey Weinstein raped her after the 2008 British Academy of Film and Television Awards, and then just months later “tricked” her into coming to a New York hotel room before pushing her to have a threesome.
The model, identified in court as Natassia M., told Los Angeles Superior Court jurors that while she had met Weinstein several times, she was shocked in 2008 to find the producer banging on her hotel room in London. Worried her publicist staying down the hall might hear, she quickly opened the door and said Weinstein “just stormed in” before uttering an ominous statement.
“He said, ‘No one gets to be like an A-lister unless it goes through me,” Natassia M. said on Wednesday. “I was just so scared of this guy, he had so much power… he embodied the movie business.”
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As he was 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 that the rape didn’t last long because she “played dead,” and Weinstein “ejaculated into his hand” and left immediately.
Too terrified to go to the police, she said she tried to figure out how to move past the assault and even reached out to Weinstein in April 2008 to drop off a recording of her voice for an audition. While she wanted to drop it off at Weinstein’s office, she said, the producer responded that she should drop the CD off to his assistant at the Peninsula Hotel—and brought up the idea of a threesome.
“I’m not the type of person to do a threesome, I’m just not wired that way. I said I do not want any hanky-panky. I told him that,” Natassia M. testified.
When she went to the New York hotel, however, she said she was escorted by an assistant to a hotel room, where she immediately saw Weinstein and another woman in the room. Crying on the stand, Natassia M. described how “furious” she was to see the other woman and said that both were “trying to get me to do a threesome with him.”
“He has you by the fucking throat, knowing that if you don’t comply…your career is down the drain, knowing that this thing you’ve worked 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 along with Weinstein—and giving “him a blowjob.” During cross-examination, the model said that she put on a robe because she felt obligated to participate and watch Weinstein have sex with the other woman.
The harrowing reality of Weinstein’s sweeping power in Hollywood is at the crux of the prosecution’s case against the 70-year-old in Los Angeles. In his second sex-crimes trial—he is already a convicted rapist—Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to seven charges after prosecutors allege he assaulted four women between 2003 and 2014.
Weinstein was previously convicted of similar crimes in a 2020 New York trial.
While Natassia M.’s allegations against Weinstein are not a part of the criminal case against him, she is among several supporting witnesses intended to help the prosecution prove he is a serial predator. Like several women who testified before her, Natassia M. spent most of Wednesday morning describing to jurors how Weinstein assaulted her—and how she felt she had no other choice but to stay silent and forget the abuse to save her own career.
She described how after the February 2008 rape—in which she said she just looked at her duvet and was “frozen”—she did not even think about going to the police and instead told her friend, director David Nutter.
“Because if you’re an actress and you’re a problem, you don’t work. If you are difficult, that thing goes around Hollywood that this person is difficult,” she noted. The model also noted at the time of the assault, she was 98 pounds, and Weinstein “reminded [her] of a boar.”
During cross-examination, Weinstein's lawyer Mark Werksman grilled Natassia M. about the details of the 2008 rape and questioned her about whether she was vocal about telling that she “didn’t want to have sex that evening.”
“You didn’t say no, or get 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 punch him, I didn’t kick him off of me, the things I thought in my head later that I should have done,” she later added.
The defense lawyers also grilled her on the Peninsula incident, asking her why she followed Weinstein's assistant into the hotel room and whether she was asked to be in a threesome.
“I wasn’t asked … he had planned to put me in an uncomfortable 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 put her in uncomfortable positions in many of those meetings. In one encounter, she said that Weinstein tried to force her friend to have oral sex with him—prompting Natassia M. to stand up for her friend and take the brunt of his assault.
She said that Weinstein move her to another room, where he masturbated while touching her. The encounter, she said, was “demeaning and humiliating.”
Years after the assault, Natassia M. said, she saw Weinstein at an Oscar Party at the Soho House—where Nicole Kidman and Lady Gaga were also in attendance. She said that Weinstein pulled her aside and questioned her about why she didn’t “go to the tabloids” about their past encounters.
In response, she said she told Weinstein she would never do that and “mess around with the most powerful guy in Hollywood.”
Weinstein, she said, simply responded: “It pays to be my friend.”
