


Disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein’s retrial on rape and sexual assault charges kicked off Wednesday with Manhattan prosecutors sharing details from three accusers, including one who’s just joining the case.
Weinstein was back in court Wednesday a year after New York’s court of appeals threw out his 2020 conviction ― which landed him a 23-year prison sentence ― after it determined the court wrongly allowed women to testify about Weinstein’s alleged abuse even though they weren’t part of the charges.
“We’re hoping that Mr. Weinstein is going to get a fair trial this time,” one of his lawyers, Imran Ansari, told reporters outside the courtroom, adding that Weinstein, who denies all allegations, is “committed to trying to clear his name.”
A jury will once again hear from the two women he was previously found guilty of attacking: Miriam Haley, a former “Project Runway” production assistant who says Weinstein forced oral sex on her at his apartment in 2006, and Jessica Mann, an actress who’s accused Weinstein of raping her in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.

During opening statements Wednesday, Manhattan assistant district attorney Shannon Lucey identified the new accuser in the case as Kaja Sokola, who was a 16-year-old actress and model newly arrived to New York from Poland when she says she met Weinstein in 2002.
The two kept in professional contact, Lucey said, until 2006 when he allegedly invited a then-19-year-old Sokola up to his Manhattan hotel room to look at scripts and then forcibly performed oral sex on her.
Wednesday marks the first time that Sokola has been named. In court documents leading up to the trial, she was identified only as Complaining Witness #3. However, Sokola previously went public with allegations against Weinstein in 2019 civil lawsuit, saying he touched her vagina in a hotel room when she was 16. That complaint named Weinstein’s brother Bob Weinstein, also a producer, Disney and Miramax as defendants, saying they failed to supervise Weinstein and empowered his sexual misconduct. She won a $3 million settlement in the case.
Lucey recounted those details during her opening statement Wednesday, saying Weinstein told Sokola when the assault was over, “See, that wasn’t so bad,” according to reporters in the courtroom.

Sokola, Haley and Mann are just three of the 80-plus women who have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct, including actors Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Weinstein’s lead lawyer, Arthur Aidala, gave his opening statement next, calling the women liars who took payouts from Weinstein.
“From this witness stand there will be 4 million reasons to lie,” Aidala told the jury, according to reports from the courtroom. “That’s how much they all took.”
Aidala described the encounters as consensual and claimed the women were all in “mutually beneficial relationships” with the Hollywood mogul.
Weinstein, who was brought into court in a wheelchair, up until recently has been awaiting trial at Rikers Island ― a notorious New York jail complex that his lawyers once compared to “a gulag where the prisoners are treated like animals.” He was moved to Bellevue Hospital last week after his legal team filed an emergency petition citing his ailing health.
Weinstein is simultaneously appealing a 2022 rape conviction in Los Angeles for which he faces 16 years in prison.