In the fall of 2010, actress Paz de la Huerta was at her highest point professionally. Raised in SoHo and on the Lower East Side by a father descended from Spanish nobility and a mother who is a policy analyst on women’s issues in Third World countries, de la Huerta had been acting and modeling since her teens, and now seemed to be breaking through. The year before she had co-starred in Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void,which had recently opened in the U.S. And her recurring role on HBO’s just-premiered Prohibition-period gangster drama, Boardwalk Empire, as mistress to Steve Buscemi’s Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, had earned her critical praise.
One night that November, de la Huerta ran into Harvey Weinstein at the Top of the Standard bar at the Standard, High Line hotel in Manhattan. She had first met Weinstein while making the movie Cider House Rules when she was 14. De la Huerta had communicated with the producer over the years after their first meeting. At around age 21, she said, Weinstein sent her some science-fiction books and suggested she might be right for a role in one of his projects. When they met at the hotel in 2010 de la Huerta was 26 and Weinstein was at the height of his powers as an Oscar-winning producer. The Weinstein Company was about to enter a streak that would see it win best picture at the Academy Awards two years in a row, first for The King’s Speech in 2011 and then The Artist in 2012. Weinstein offered de la Huerta a ride home to the Tribeca neighborhood where they both lived. In de la Huerta’s account of the night, Weinstein arrived at her apartment demanding to come inside and have a drink. “Things got very uncomfortable very fast,” the actress, now 33, told Vanity Fair in a phone interview on Wednesday.
“Immediately when we got inside the house, he started to kiss me and I kind of brushed [him] away,” de la Huerta said. “Then he pushed me onto the bed and his pants were down and he lifted up my skirt. I felt afraid. . . . It wasn’t consensual . . . It happened very quickly. . . . He stuck himself inside me. . . . When he was done he said he’d be calling me. I kind of just laid on the bed in shock.”
De la Huerta described a second assault that allegedly happened in late December 2010, when Weinstein showed up in her building lobby after she came home from a photo shoot. The actress said she had been drinking, and was frightened by Weinstein, who had been repeatedly calling her, despite her asking him to leave her alone. “He hushed me and said, ‘Let’s talk about this in your apartment,’” de la Huerta said. “I was in no state. I was so terrified of him. . . . I did say no, and when he was on top of me I said, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ He kept humping me and it was disgusting. He’s like a pig. . . . He raped me.”
Afterward, de la Huerta said, “I laid there feeling sick. He looked at me and said, ‘I’ll put you in a play.’ He left and I never heard from him again. He knew he had done a bad thing.”
In many respects, de la Huerta’s story mirrors the more than 60 other women who have opened up about the producer since allegations of his sexual misconduct first appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker last month. But her case is unusual in one key respect—it may see charges brought against Weinstein. De la Huerta has been interviewed by New York Police Department detective Nicholas DiGaudio, who is leading the Weinstein investigation, and her attorney has provided material to New York District Attorney Maxine B. Rosenthal, who is considering bringing charges in the case.