Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted a 16-year-old model inside his SoHo apartment — and then bragged to her about helping boost the careers of Gwyneth Paltrow and Penélope Cruz, a court heard Wednesday at the start of his Manhattan retrial.
The disgraced film producer’s youngest accuser, Kaja Sokola, was identified as the new witness set to confront the accused serial sex pest in Manhattan Supreme Court after his prior conviction at the height of the #MeToo movement was tossed on appeal.
The jailed onetime Miramax mogul, 73, held the Poland native down and forcibly performed oral sex on her “while she cried and said ‘please don’t do this'” in 2006, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Shannon Lucey told jurors during opening statements.
He first allegedly assaulted the Poland native in 2002, after she agreed to meet him for lunch, the prosecutor said.
Weinstein then had his driver take them to his apartment, where he invited her up under the guise of just needing to grab “some papers,” Lucey said.
When inside, the “Pulp Fiction” producer demanded that the teenager take off her shirt — saying “This is what happens in the industry” — and then sexually assaulted her, the prosecutor said.
After the attack ended, Weinstein name-dropped Paltrow and Cruz before giving Sokola a sick word of purported advice — that she “needed to work on her stubbornness,” Lucey said.
Weinstein was wheeled into the courtroom in a wheelchair Wednesday morning. He sat at the defense table wearing a navy suit, white shirt and tie.
As the prosecutor described the alleged horrific attacks, he sipped calmly from a glass of water.
Sokola is expected to testify at trial, alongside two other women who say Weinstein lured them into his web with the promise of advancing their careers before sexually assaulting them.
Weinstein was separately convicted of rape in California after an Italian model testified that he threw himself on her after appearing uninvited outside her hotel room during an Italian film festival in 2013.
He’s currently being housed at Bellevue Hospital after convincing a judge to temporarily transfer him from Rikers Island, where he claimed he was not getting proper treatment for his various health ailments.