Woman testifies Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted her in 1991 and 2008: ‘I thought, This is really terrible’
The woman who was the first to accuse Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment, and who now testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, says her memory of the incident was blocked by the trauma of the time, and that she only decided to come forward after the New Yorker published its bombshell story Monday showing that Weinstein had harassed dozens in the past.
She said she “fought my way through” the incident in 1991, after she was harassed at work by Weinstein as a production assistant for Miramax, the company he’d co-founded.
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She also says she decided to make the allegations public in 2012 after the New Yorker story was published, because she felt she had “nothing to lose.”
“I thought, This is really terrible, and I’m not going to put myself through this again,” Lauren Sivan, who is speaking to the Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington on Wednesday, told CNN on Tuesday night. “And I don’t think I could even imagine being a victim of something like this.”
“I don’t think there will be a day that I will ever forget,” she added. “How do you not put yourself through this again?”
Sivan said she would not hold back her testimony until she felt “the Senate committee and the American public” had heard her story.
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She is also speaking about her encounter with Weinstein at the Weinstein Company in New York City.
“I never told anybody before. I thought, This could be my last chance, I don’t want to get him back,” she recalled. She said she took a bus to the Weinstein Company, where she worked for seven years, and got off at the Miramax lot, which “had been built like a prison” after the company was acquired by Disney in the early 1980s.