Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra gave evidence against Harvey Weinstein in court after keeping her rape accusation against the former Hollywood honcho largely hidden for decades.
For more than a quarter-century, she told only few friends that the once-revered producer had pinned her to a bed and violated her, until she came forward publicly in 2017.
Now, Ms Sciorra has become the first of Weinstein's accusers to give evidence at his New York City rape trial.
Ms Sciorra, best known for her work in The Sopranos, is set to be a key witness in the trial.
Her voice quivered as she told the court that she tried to fight the movie mogul off after he pushed his way into her apartment and pinned her on a bed in the early 1990s.
Ms Sciorra said: "I was punching him. I was kicking him. I was just trying to get him off of me"
She said he overpowered her, seizing her hands and holding them over her head, and raped her.
"I didn't have very much fight left inside me," Ms Sciorra testified.
"My body shut down. It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake in a way that was very unusual. I didn't even know what was happening. It was like a seizure or something."
When she ran into him about a month later and confronted him about what had happened, he parried, "That's what all the nice Catholic girls say," she testified.
Then, she said, he leaned towards her and said menacingly: "This remains between you and I."
"I thought he was going to hit me right there," Ms Sciorra said.
Ms Sciorra, 59, started acting in the late 1980s and soon drew acclaim for her leading part in Spike Lee's 1991 film Jungle Fever and her role as a pregnant woman molested by her doctor in 1992's The Hand That Rocks The Cradle the next year.
The New York trial involves just a pair of the dozens of allegations that surfaced against Weinstein in recent years.
He is charged with forcibly performing oral sex on one complainant in his apartment in 2006 and raping an aspiring actress in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.
