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 Tribeca. 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.
Because de la Huerta alleges a forceful rape which happened after June 2006, within New York’s statute of limitations for rape in the first degree, her case is among the most compelling for prosecutors. DiGaudio confirmed that he has spoken with de la Huerta, along with other women, as part of the department’s investigation into Weinstein. “I believe based on my interviews with Paz that from the N.Y.P.D. standpoint we have enough to make an arrest,” DiGaudio said. The department has reason to assemble its case with particular care. In 2015, the N.Y.P.D. questioned Weinstein in connection with a groping allegation involving an Italian model named Ambra Battilana, but the D.A. declined to move forward with the case, citing insufficient evidence to prove a crime. Police in London and Los Angeles are also pursuing potential criminal cases.
Through a spokeswoman, Weinstein has “unequivocally denied” any allegations of nonconsensual sex. She reiterated that position when reached Thursday.
At the time of the alleged assaults, de la Huerta said she told one person—her therapist, SueAnne Piliero, who recently supplied a letter to the actress about her recollections from those sessions. “I recall you telling me that Harvey Weinstein was seeking sexual contact with you on more than one occasion with the promise of additional roles,” Piliero said in the letter, which de la Huerta has shared with Vanity Fair and with the New York district attorney’s office. “I recall you reporting to me a sexual encounter with Harvey Weinstein involving intercourse in your apartment in 2010 that resulted in you feeling victimized. I recall you telling me that it felt coercive to you and that you didn’t want to have sex with him, but felt that you had to as he was a man of power and rank and you couldn’t say no to his sexual advances.”
In 2014, de la Huerta told another person about the alleged assaults, a journalist named Alexis Faith, who recorded the conversation but never published it at the actress’s request. “I was always scared, because when I was younger anyone that had ever hurt me somehow, they were protected and I was the one who got into trouble,” de la Huerta said. “I didn’t want to say something that they were gonna make it look like I’m just some slutty girl.” Faith has provided the recording of that conversation to the D.A., a person familiar with the case said.
After her experiences with Weinstein, de la Huerta said her life and career took a dark turn. She became depressed and drank excessively; after a second season, HBO did not renew her Boardwalk Empire contract.
“I was very traumatized,” de la Huerta said. “I don’t think I was taking very good care of myself. What happened with Harvey left me scarred for many years. I felt so disgusted by it, with myself . . . I became a little self-destructive. It was really hard for me to deal, to cope.”
During a stunt accident while filming the 2013 horror movie Nurse 3D, de la Huerta broke her tailbone and fractured her spine. She has continued to work in independent films, recently playing Hippolyta in an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For the upcoming movie Puppy Love, de la Huerta filmed a role as a drug-addicted prostitute who is repeatedly abused. “I think it was very therapeutic for me to play her,” de la Huerta said. “Because I knew how she felt.”
