Shocking Testimony: Mimi Haleyi Says Harvey Weinstein Removed Her Tampon To Sexually Assault Her
He held her down and performed oral sex even though she was on her period.
Getty Harvey Weinstein's sexual assault trial is entering its third week and the testimony grows more and more disturbing with each day. Five different women have shared the memories of being sexually assaulted by the one-time film industry tycoon. In January, one of the victims, Mimi Hayeyi, took the stand to tell her story and broke down in tears as she recalled the horrific details of the incident.
Haleyi was a production assistant who had originally approached Weinstein looking for work on one of his many film and television projects. Knowing his reputation with women, she tried to keep her interactions with him professional but things took a turn when she agreed to meet with him in his New York apartment in 2006. Once he had her alone, he cornered her and assaulted her on his bed.
Her testimony is very detailed and could be difficult to read for people who are sensitive to graphic descriptions of sexual violence. Please be cautious in reading about her story.
Who is Mimi Haleyi?
1. Who is Mimi Haleyi and how did she meet Harvey Weinstein?
Mimi Haleyi grew up in Sweden and is currently 42 years old. In 2004, she had been working as a production assistant to Michael White, a theatre and movie producer known for plays like the stage version of the Rocky Horror Show and films such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. However, White had suffered health problems at that time and Haleyi was looking for new work. She introduced herself to Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival in the hopes he could get her a job working on one of his many projects.
Weinstein agreed to meet with Haleyi privately and invited her up to his hotel room to discuss the possibility of her working for him. When she got there, he started talking about her body and asked her to give him a massage. She declined, suggesting he should ask the hotel if they could send a massage therapist. She testified that the encounter left her feeling humiliated and doubtful that she would be hired by Weinstein.
Haleyi isn't the only woman who has testified that Weinstein used massage as a pretext for sexual contact. Fellow plaintiff, in this case, Jessica Mann described Wesintein demanding a massage from her in one of their encounters as well.
2. Weinstein hired — and then harassed her.
After the Cannes incident, Haleyi was surprised to hear from someone at the Weinstein Company in New York offering her a job on Project Runway. She accepted and went to work as a production assistant on the series. However, that meant Weinstein himself could easily find her and even knew where she lived. Haleyi says Weinstein got in touch with her to invite her to Paris to see a fashion show. She declined, fully aware that he was known in the industry as a womanizer, if not a sexual predator. Even after she turned him down. he persisted, coming to her apartment uninvited and begging her to join in. She put him off saying, "You know, you have a terrible reputation with women.” The statement offended him but he left and Haleyi did not go to Paris with him.
3. Haleyi testified that Weinstein assaulted her in 2006.
In 2006, Haleyi accepted an invitation to meet with Weinstein in his New York apartment. She claims that when she arrived, he offered her a drink and they sat on a couch in what started out as a typical social interaction. But it didn't take long for him to start forcing himself on her. “Really soon into me being there, he kind of came towards me and lunged at me, trying to kiss me,” Haleyi said. “I got off the sofa and said, ‘Oh, no, no.”
She tried to get away from him but he didn't back away.
“He was coming towards me physically, and I was backed into a bedroom in the corner that was on the edge of that open-space area,” she recalled. “I was backwards, because he was pushing me with his body until I got to the bed, and I fell backwards onto the bed and I tried to get up, and he pushed me down.”
“I just said, ‘No, no I don’t want this to happen. This is not going to happen. I’m on my period,’” Haleyi said, breaking into tears on the stand. “I was just trying to tell him anything to make him stop.”
Haleyi told Weinstein she was wearing a tampon but even that didn't dissuade him. He forced her on to the bed and pinned her down. “And then I said, ‘No, no,’ and at that point I started realizing what was actually happening: I’m being raped,” she said. He removed her tampon and performed forcible oral sex on her as she continued to resist him.
4. How did Weinstein respond to this story in court?
Weinstein was sitting in court as Haleyi described this assault in excruciating detail, breaking down emotionally on the stand as she spoke. The man she was accused of the attack was sitting across from her offering no reaction. At one point during her testimony, he reportedly popped a Mentos candy into his mouth.
5. She later had consensual sex with Weinstein.
Within weeks of the assault, Weinstein invited Haleyi to his apartment again. She claims she went, hoping to regain a sense of control over the situation. As soon as she arrived, he led her to the bed and initiated sex. She says she does not consider what happened next an assault because she did not resist but she shared a story of a rather disturbing intimate encounter where he whispered degrading things during intercourse.
“He said things like, ‘You’re a whore and a bitch,” Haleyi recalled. “He thought that would somehow turn me on. I was lying there very motionless and saying, ‘I’m not a bitch, I’m not a whore.’”
The fact that she had consensual sexual contact with him after the assault mirrors stories told by other women who have spoke out about Weinstein's tendencies, including Jessica Mann who is also one of the plaintiffs in the New York case.
6. Did her description of his body match the details shared by Jessica Mann?
Some of the most shocking testimony in the case came from Jessica Mann who claimed that Weinstein has severe deformities of his genitals. “The first time I saw him fully naked. I thought he was deformed and intersex. He has 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 testified. The jury was allowed to see full-body photos of Weinstein nude during court this week but the photos were not shared with reporters.
Haleyi did not share similar descriptions of Weinstein's body. We can only speculate why but it's possible that she simply didn't see him fully naked. Mann's relationship with Weinstein took place over several years and included a number of consensual encounters where she had ample opportunity to become familiar with his whole body. Haleyi describes only two encounters, one of which did not involve his penis at all. In the other, it isn't clear if she got a full view of his genitals.
The Weinstein trial is ongoing at this time. The prosecution rested their case on Thursday and the defense will begin their side of the arguments, At this time, Weinstein's lawyers plan to call five witnesses but Weinstein himself is unlikely to testify.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.