the law

Weinstein Accuser Says He Has No Testicles

Photo: Johannes Eisele/AFP via Getty Images

Jessica Mann testified in a Manhattan courtroom Friday that Harvey Weinstein engaged in forced oral sex and raped her in early 2013 and alleged that she was in a twisted relationship with him because of her sexual inexperience.

As Mann tearily described alleged incidents, she also made the bombshell claim that Weinstein doesn’t have testicles and appeared to have a vagina, saying she thought he was “intersex” the first time she saw him naked.

Weinstein faces charges in New York City for allegedly raping Mann, and for an alleged sexual assault on former actress Mimi Haleyi. Prosecutors have used Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra’s allegation that Weinstein raped her around late 1993 to bolster their claim that Weinstein has a pattern of predatory behavior. Weinstein has maintained his innocence.

“He would talk very dirty to me about fantasies and things, and compare me to the other things actresses that he said were doing kinky, dirty things with him,” Mann testified. “He always wanted to film me. I never gave him permission.”

“He would say, ‘Do you like my big, fat, Jewish dick?’” claimed Mann, 34.

“The first time I saw him fully naked,” she said, “I thought he was deformed and intersex. He has an extreme scarring that I didn’t know, maybe [he] was a burn victim …”

“He does not have testicles, and it appears that he has a vagina,” she claimed, saying she had oral sex with Weinstein.

As Mann claimed that he had deformed genitals, Weinstein dropped his head.

“He also peed on me once,” she also said of Weinstein, who is 67.

Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi asked Mann to describe Weinstein’s hygiene.

“It was very bad,” she said. “He smelled like shit — excuse me, sorry, like poop. He just was dirty.”

Mann entered the courtroom at 10:06 a.m. Weinstein eyed her as she walked to the witness stand. Illuzzi’s initial questioning was clearly meant to establish both Mann’s naïveté and vulnerability.

Mann testified that she grew up in a Washington State dairy community, that she had a turbulent family life, and was raised in a strict Christian tradition.

“It was a lot of cows, it smelled like poop,” she said. “There wasn’t a lot of culture.”

Asked about her religious upbringing, Mann said, “I would describe how I grew up [as] a cult. It was extremely religious, Evangelical.”

Mann moved to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming an actress at age 25. She met Weinstein at a party around early 2013, introducing herself when she saw him talking to her roommate. Later that evening, Weinstein found Mann and got her phone number. Someone reached out and he took her to Book Soup, a bookstore on Sunset Boulevard.

“He had told me that it’s important for me to understand film history if I wanted to be an actress,” she said. “He wanted to give me some books on the film industry.”

They met there and he bought her four books and one was on Alfred Hitchcock, she said.  She described him as normal and he was “very normal and very engaging.”

“There were a few moments where he made like  a grunting sound, and he would look at me, but I didn’t know if it was a personality, or sort of an autistic-like trait,” she said.

At a subsequent meeting at a hotel bar, Weinstein claimed he was annoyed by people coming up to him, and asked the restaurant to bring their orders to his hotel suite. The staff brought everything upstairs, but “he was not interested in finishing our food.”

“I was hungry,” she said.

“He started to like, undress himself a little, but you know, I just thought he was just getting comfortable, but he continued, and he walked into his bedroom, and he wanted me to go in there, and I was hesitating and he said, ‘Let me give you a massage, take off your shirt … just relax.’”

“I was like no, that’s okay. I don’t want a massage and this went on for a good moment and um, he made me feel stupid, like, why did I think it was such a big deal, and he said, ‘Well if you’re not going to let me give you a massage, give me a massage,’” she alleged.

“At that point, he had his shirt off and he had lotion. I started putting the lotion on his back … just like very awkwardly … with flat palm, stiff fingers, and smeared it around,” she said.

“He had a lot of a lot of blackheads, and the texture of that was uncomfortable,” she also said.

While Mann didn’t have sexual interest in him, Weinstein reached out to her and she did see him socially after the massage incident.

At one party, Mann and Talita, an aspiring actress and her roommate, saw Weinstein; he asked to meet them in the hotel bar to talk about acting.

“It started with him saying I reminded him of his wife because I was clumsy, and she was clumsy, and he told me I was prettier than Natalie Portman,” she said. “He gave us criticism on both our images. He said that I needed to clear my skin up. He told Talita she needed to lose weight. He goes, ‘You guys are perfect for this film that I’m producing. It’s a vampire film, and you both made perfect leads.’”

The bar was closing and he urged them to join him upstairs.

“I said, ‘Ha, ha, ha, oh no, I know what that means,” she recalled, saying that Weinstein laughed at her and responded, “I am a harmless old man.”

Weinstein was pacing. Mann and her friend are sitting on the sofa and he walked back into his room, she said.

“He called my name,” she said, crying. Talita urged her to see what Weinstein wanted.

“I leaned in and I said, ‘What do you want?’” she said. “And then he grabbed my arm, and he pulls me around, and as he’s pulling me around, he closes the door and he says to Talita, ‘We’ll just be a minute.’”

“The more I fought, the angrier he got,” she alleged. Weinstein then said, “Let me do something for you. I’m not letting you leave until I do something for you.”

“He wouldn’t tell me,” she claimed. “He told me to sit on the bed, and that’s when he went down on me.”

“I started to fake an orgasm to get out of it,” she said. “He asked me how it was, if I liked it. And uhm, I was nervous, so I told him, ‘Oh, it was the best I ever had.’”

“I got out of there as fast as I could,” she testified, saying Talita was asking, “What happened? I said, ‘We just gotta go’ and um, we left.”

“I made the decision to be in a relationship with him,” she later said. “And part of that was because I was sexual with very few people. I entered into what I thought was going to be a real relationship with him — and it was extremely degrading from that point on.”

Mann said she was worried about breaking off a relationship with him.

“I thought he was gonna hurt my father,” she said, explaining, “he said to me that he has guys with bats …”

Mann was in New York with a friend who was on a business trip not long after these alleged encounters. Mann, her friend, and Talita were going to meet with Weinstein at the Doubletree Hotel on 51st Street and Lexington Avenue for a breakfast meeting. Mann was staying with her friend at this hotel. When Mann got downstairs, Weinstein was checking into the hotel. She confronted him to ask what he was doing.

“He pulled me aside, to the corner, and he told me not to embarrass him,” she said. After Weinstein was checked in, he put his arm on her and started leading her upstairs. They started to argue in his room. He demanded that Mann get undressed. Mann tried to leave twice but he blocked the door, she alleged.

Left without options, Mann said, “I gave up at that point, and I undressed, and he stood over me until I was completely naked, and then he told me to lay on the bed, and once he was naked and laying on the bed, he walked into the bathroom and sort of closed the door behind him,” she said. “And then he came out naked and he was … he got on top of me, and that’s when he put himself inside of me, his penis inside of me.”

After the alleged rape, Mann said she went to the bathroom.

“I’m just trying to collect myself for a minute, and I see a needle in the trash can, and I flip out, and I grab it, and I look at it, and I remember the name, because I wanted to Google it, and I was …” Mann started to weep at this point. “It was the realization that he stabbed himself with a needle, and there has to be blood because he was inside of me … I was in shock over that.”

Asked whether Weinstein used a condom, Mann said, “No.”

She was asked about the needle.

“I do not remember the medical term, but when I Googled it, it basically implied dead-penis-type thing,” she said.

They walked downstairs shortly thereafter. She did not tell her friend or Talita what allegedly had happened. At breakfast, Weinstein mentioned a movie premiere; Talita and her friend urged Mann to stay another day.

They went to the premiere.

“He wanted me to have tea with him and his daughter right after,” she said. “I did not do that. He was mad.”

As Mann testified, several people in the courtroom rows reserved for Weinstein’s team laughed.

Mann then described an alleged incident at The Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel, which prosecutors said was in November 2013. She was in a relationship with a “pretty well known actor,” and had been avoiding Weinstein. She thought she had to tell him about her relationship.

“I was scared to tell Harvey, but I felt I had to do it, because I wanted integrity for our relationship,” Mann said of her new boyfriend, saying she didn’t want Weinstein to continue to behave as he had.

“During the course of my relationship with Harvey, he would tell me things like rules, ‘You can date anyone you want, but not someone in the industry. I find that disrespectful,’” she said. “Since I was dating an actor, I was particularly concerned about the actor. We were supposed to talk … ”

“And so I said to him, ‘Harvey you know my dreams and my hopes of finding a relationship. And I want to get married. I want you to know that I met someone, that I already started a relationship … that this was very important to me to protect our sexual relationship.”

Weinstein demanded to know who her boyfriend was. “I said, I’m not going to tell you.” He pressed Mann: Was it a banker? Was it an investment guy? A Wall Street guy?

 “He goes, ‘is it an actor?’”

“And I looked down … didn’t say anything … and he knew,” she said.

When she refused to answer Weinstein, his eyes darkened and she said that, “he ripped me up from my chair, from the table, and he was screaming, ‘You owe me! You owe me one more time!”

As Mann recalled this, she sobbed.

“As he was dragging me into the bedroom, I didn’t fall but I was having a lot of trouble keeping my balance, he was pulling me so fast.”

“He threw me down on the edge of the bed, and he was demanding that I take off my clothes and I was begging him,” she said sobbing, her breath strained. “And I said, ‘No, please, no!”

“He stood over me, and he said, ‘take off your clothes’ again, and I said ‘no’ again,” Mann testified. “And he said, ‘I don’t have time for games,’ and he lunged at me with both hands and they went into my pants and he ripped my pants so hard, and so fast off of me, that I had three scratches down each leg, from the top of my thighs to the top of my knee,” she said. “Only the middle scratch had dots of blood that had come up, but there were three red marks.”

“And it hurt and stung, like a paper cut, but deeper.”

“And I froze, and I lost my voice, and I crawled back to the pillows, and I got in a ball, and I had no strength,” she continued. “I remember thinking, because he had walked into the bathroom, I was hearing myself saying, run, run, pull up your pants and run.”

Weinstein pulled her by the ankles and put his mouth on her vagina. He then penetrated her, Mann alleged.

“I just remember looking at the TV, and staring at it, and then it went black. I don’t know if I passed out,” she said. Next, she said she was on her knees, “and he’s shoving his penis in my mouth.”

Weinstein then climaxed, she said, and came in her mouth without her permission.

“And it choked me, and it was so bad, and when he was done, he went and laid on the bed, and I crawled into the bathroom on my hands and knees … to try to get out this taste in my mouth.”

“And then he called me and I was scared,” she said. “And so I went out there after compressing my eyes with some cold water to try to hide the fact that I was crying.”

“And he said, things like, ‘okay now, now, you can go have your relationship and what you can do is you can bring me other girls. You can be my, what do they call it? A wing girl.”

“Then he apologized to me,” she continued, recalling he said, “So sorry about earlier, I just find you so attractive, I couldn’t resist.”

“And then he would want me to answer him that we’re friends. ‘Right yes, we’re friends.’ Yes, we’re friends … ’” she said.

Mann testified that she did have sporadic contact with Weinstein after this alleged incident, and had a consensual encounter with him in 2016.

As the sloppily besuited Weinstein left court for the day, Vulture asked whether Mann’s description of his body was accurate. “Yeah, perfect,” he groused.

Update, February 24: Harvey Weinstein’s verdict has been announced.

Weinstein Accuser Says He Has No Testicles