The last time actress Katherine Kendall saw Harvey Weinstein was at a party after the 2010 premiere of The King’s Speech that she attended with a friend. “I turned a corner and there he was,” says Kendall, best known for 1996’s Swingers. “I felt my knees buckle and I wanted to leave immediately.” Kendall, who also teaches dance in West Hollywood, has accused Weinstein of inviting her to what she thought was a professional meeting in 1993 when she was 24 and chasing her, while nude, around his New York apartment.
Now she’s deciding whether she can stomach encountering the producer again, this time in a courtroom where he’ll face charges stemming from allegations of sexual assault and rape. As the Jan. 6 trial date nears, Kendall says she has been battling anxiety and migraines, weighing whether to travel to New York and attend the proceedings alongside other Weinstein accusers. “Maybe if I’m prepared for it and I get myself in the right headspace, I’ll be OK,” Kendall says, noting that she steadies herself by avoiding negative comments on social media and sharing supportive notes with the other women.
“Will it be a strong message for us all to be there? Would that be helpful? It might be a good thing for him to have to see us.”
The Weinstein trial will mark a pivotal moment in the lives of the more than 80 women who have accused the former mogul of sexual harassment or assault since October 2017 — and in the far-reaching #MeToo movement they helped spark. (Weinstein has denied any allegations of nonconsensual sex.) For many of Weinstein’s accusers, the notion of him facing a jury for his alleged crimes was unthinkable when he was at the height of his power in Hollywood and New York. Some of the women are planning to attend the trial to show solidarity with the alleged victims in the case, and to bolster prosecution witnesses like actress Annabella Sciorra, who is expected to testify that Weinstein raped her at her New York apartment in the early 1990s.
In the fall, a group of more than 20 of Weinstein’s accusers, who call themselves the Silence Breakers, hired a publicist through Time’s Up to share for the trial: former Joe Biden spokesperson Kendra Barkoff Lamy at SKDKnickerbocker in Washington. “I believe that our presence is important right now; it’s just about supporting each other,” says Rosanna Arquette, who plans to attend the first day of the trial as well as the days when Sciorra testifies. Arquette has said she went to a hotel to get a script from Weinstein in the early ’90s and he answered the door in a bathrobe and pulled her hand toward his crotch. “This trial, yes, in the long run is for everyone. But this happened to us. It actually happened to our lives. Especially the rape victims, their lives have been shattered in trauma, in years of living with this. And many, many careers have been affected, including mine.”
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter