The intense sibling betrayal that convinced the jury Harvey Weinstein did NOT assault his ‘youngest victim’

Kaja Sokola gazes at the Manhattan skyline from the balcony of the 52nd floor apartment she shares with her young son, three cats, and two dogs.

The ex-fashion model still has her modeling skills, posing with ease as though she were on the front of a magazine while her blue dress flutters in the breeze.

But the spectacular view of both the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges came at a much more painful cost than her $11,000 per month rent.

Sokola is Harvey Weinstein’s youngest sexual assault accuser, claiming he raped her twice in 2002 and 2006 when she was just 16 and 19.

Her statement in 2006 played a crucial role in Weinstein’s recent trial in the New York Supreme Court, where he faced accusations of sexually assaulting three women. The trial came to a close last week.

Despite being found guilty and facing an extended prison sentence of at least 10 years, the shamed film producer was acquitted of all accusations connected to her claims.

Sokola alleges the jury was swayed by the shocking betrayal of her older sister, who gave Weinstein’s lawyers a decade-old journal that didn’t include him in a list of men who sexually assaulted her, thereby undermining her case. 

Now unrestrained by the rules of criminal court, the 39-year-old tells the Daily Mail the whole story behind the sensational trial. She describes, for the first ever time on camera, what she maintains Weinstein allegedly did to her, the hell she went through in the years that followed, and how the biggest villain of her story isn’t the one behind bars.

The greatest betrayal

Sokola endured days on the witness stand, telling her story in excruciating detail and then being interrogated by Weinstein’s defense.

Then on the fourth day of her testimony, she was ambushed with one of her 20 ‘journals’ written in 2015, which she said was actually a workbook for addiction treatment.

Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala questioned her about a section where she wrote about the trauma three people, including Weinstein, inflicted on her.

One man was described as ‘rape, physically aggressive’ and another accused of ‘forcing sex.’

But when it came to what she wrote about Weinstein, she wrote – and Aidala quoted to the court – he is ‘promising me help and nothing came of it.’

That was seemingly enough to sway the jury against her allegation that he’d abused her.

Sokola was stunned when they produced the journal in court.

‘I was shaking,’ Sokola told the Daily Mail, accusing her sister Ewa, 50, of strategically ‘torpedoing’ the case by giving it to Weinstein’s team.

‘I asked her for my diaries, three years prior to that, to be able to use them in my divorce case, and she said she didn’t know where they were.’ 

Yet one ended up in the Manhattan court being used against her.

‘Who would stand against their own relative, right? That can bring doubt, I agree with that,’ she said.

‘The only doubt, which is in this case the reasonable doubt, right, was my sister.’

Ewa claimed she only became aware of the journal last December when a former friend of Sokola was moving houses and wanted to offload it.

‘There are 20 years’ worth of Kaja’s journals and, in them, not one word indicates that Harvey Weinstein ever laid a finger on Kaja,’ she said in a statement.

‘I could not in good conscience suppress what I had seen in this diary, knowing Kaja as I do.’ 

Ewa initially started as a witness for prosecution, there to confirm a key part of her sister’s story. 

But Sokola claimed behind the scenes, her ‘jealous’ sister was secretly working as a double agent, helping Weinstein and his team.

Aidala even referred to Ewa switching sides in his closing argument: ‘She was supporting our theory of the case. That everything was fine with her sister.’

Sokola speculated that Aidala was added to Weinstein’s legal team because of his law partner’s connection to her sister, and how they got the journal.

Sigismondo Renda is a lawyer at Baratta, Baratta & Aidala, the firm where Weinstein’s lawyer works. She is also Kaja’s sister’s ‘best friend’ of about 20 years.

Now-deleted social media photos showed them on vacations together around Europe. Sokola didn’t know they even knew each other until she was ambushed with the journal on the stand.

It was the final straw in a decades-long rivalry between the sisters.

Growing up with a 12-year age gap and personalities that were ‘like apples and oranges,’ Kaja claims Ewa never supported her career and told her to ‘stop dreaming.’

Sokola believes she was envious of her modeling career and later of the $3.5 million settlement she got from her lawsuit against Weinstein, Disney, and Miramax.

The frayed relationship exploded last year when Ewa stayed with her for about three weeks in NYC while they both testified to the grand jury ahead of Weinstein’s re-trial.

But days after they gave their testimony, a raging argument between the sisters went nuclear.

Ewa claimed in an affidavit that Sokola ‘threatened to commit suicide by throwing herself off of the balcony’ in front of her son.

Police hauled Sokola, who was drunk, away in handcuffs to a mental hospital. Her son was placed in foster care for about two months by a Family Court order.

Sokola vehemently denies threatening to jump off the balcony, insisting ‘I would never do that’ in front of her son, and said she was only in hospital about 20 hours.

Ewa petitioned for custody of the boy, but he was instead placed with a neighbor and Sokola was able to visit frequently.

Sokola said the episode revealed Ewa was in cahoots with her ex-husband Sebastian Mene during their bitter divorce and custody battle, which Sokola won after the judge ruled he was abusive.

‘She stole his passport from my house, she stole all of his IDs. And her and my ex-husband were conniving to get him on a plane and take him to Poland. Monsters are real,’ she said, breaking down in tears.

For Sokola, forgiveness is beyond the pale – and she completely cut off her sister despite it feeling like ‘having your arm cut off’.

‘I definitely don’t want my son to be close to people like that,’ she said.

Was Ewa’s betrayal worse than what Weinstein allegedly did to her?

‘I think so because it also makes me feel very dirty and ashamed that we have the same blood,’ she said.

Ewa’s lawyer Daniel Schneider insisted the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was aware in advance that Ewa provided the defense with the journal.

‘If Kaja was blindsided by Ewa’s testimony, then it is the People that betrayed her for keeping that information from her,’ he wrote in a letter to Sokola’s lawyers.

‘Your client may view the truth as a betrayal, but people are not obligated to lie or keep secrets because the information is negative, simply to protect your client.’

Ewa called her sister’s claims against her a ‘bizarre smear campaign’ and accused her of making up her claims against Weinstein to secure support for a visa – a claim that was also aired in court by the defense.

The ‘youngest victim’ 

Sokola’s modeling career started on a whim when she was just 14 and her family entered her in a local beauty contest in Poland that swept her into a whirlwind of fashion shows and magazine covers from Milan to Paris and Tokyo.

But acting, and the chance to be famous, was her real passion – ever since she was the chubby kid in school using performance as an escape from taunting.

She arrived in New York in July 2002, a doe-eyed and overwhelmed 16-year-old dazzled by the bright lights but seeing a chance to start her Hollywood dream.

‘My modeling career developed overnight… Everything was going very fast and I believed the same thing could happen with acting,’ she said.

That’s where Weinstein came in. Arguably the most powerful producer at the time, his attention seemed like a ticket to the big time.

He invited her to lunch and rolled up in a fancy car. As the excited teen told him she was 16 and from Poland she didn’t realize where they were really going.

Sokola had no reason to distrust him – her kind and gentle father was about the same age and she had only held hands and kissed her high school boyfriend.

She suspected nothing until they were inside the apartment. As soon as the door closed, Weinstein allegedly demanded the terrified girl take off her clothes.

‘I didn’t want to do that. I was panicking,’ Sokola told the court in May. 

‘And then he said that if I want to be an actress, that’s what actors do in films, so I should get used to it. If a director says you have you take your clothes off, you have to take your clothes off.

‘I was scared. I was scared of him.’

Terrified, she took off her top and Weinstein allegedly moved her into the bathroom with his pants and underwear around his ankles. 

‘He put a hand on my vagina, under my underwear. He took my hand and put it on his penis… and then he was using my hand to masturbate,’ she told the court.

Sokola described how Weinstein allegedly stared back at her in the bathroom mirror, his eyes ‘black and scary’ like he’d switched from Doctor Jekyll to Mr Hyde.

‘It’s like he was not even there. He looked almost like he was possessed,’ she said.

When she tried to leave after Weinstein ejaculated on the floor, she said he angrily bragged that he made the careers of Gwyneth Paltrow and Penelope Cruz.

Sokola soon left for a six-week modeling gig in Tokyo, but was overwhelmed with guilt and shame and spiraled into eating disorders, anxiety, and depression.

‘I was completely traumatized, never experienced anything like that before,’ she said. 

‘I think like my body and my mind could not connect the dots and really digest what happened to me… I started to isolate myself from people.’

There were other run-ins with Weinstein over the next few years, she claimed, like the time he groped her breast during a car ride in 2004 and tried to get to her room at the Four Seasons in 2005, making a scene in the lobby when security stopped him.

A nightmare repeated

By 2006, Sokola was at a crossroads.

She was engaged to marry a wealthy businessman who asked her to come to London with him, study economics at university, and work for his company.

But her passion for acting burned harder than a lust for money, and she decided to give acting one more serious push.

‘I decided that I don’t want his money, I don’t want this stuff, and I moved to New York and I ended up broke,’ she said.

‘In my mom’s eyes, I’ve lost the biggest opportunity in my life to achieve something,’ she recalled, claiming she ‘completely cut me off.’

Sokola craved the approval of her family and was so desperate to prove she ‘wasn’t a joke’ that she got back in contact with Weinstein.

He cast her as an extra in The Nanny Diaries, which she thought meant he believed in her but now claims was him giving her just enough to ‘keep me on the hook.’

‘He’s a great manipulator and a huge bully, so put these two things together and you’ll have an atomic bomb,’ she said.

Days before her 20th birthday on May 4, 2006, Sokola set up a lunch at the Tribeca Grand, now the Roxy Hotel, in Manhattan with her sister Ewa and Weinstein.

‘I hoped that if my sister saw that other people treated me seriously, other people who had something to say in the business, [my family] would look at me in a different light,’ she explained.

After some conversation, Weinstein told Sokola he had a script for her to read and she should come with him upstairs. 

Sokola expected Ewa, by then a 32-year-old cardiologist, being there would protect her as it would be too risky for Weinstein to try anything.

‘Having my sister downstairs, I didn’t believe he could do something like this again… [but] it turned out very different,’ she said. 

Weinstein led her to a hotel room, and once they got inside he allegedly grabbed her by the left shoulder and pushed her on the bed.

‘He forced himself on my vagina – he raped me,’ she told the court last month. 

‘He took off my shoes and he ripped off my stockings and my underwear.’

Sokola, who weighed only 125 lbs at the time, alleged Weinstein used his much greater mass to hold her down, and she couldn’t push him off. 

‘He pinned me to the bed, I couldn’t move under him… his whole body was pinning me to the bed… it was like a rock was on me, it was too heavy,’ she told the jury.

‘I didn’t scream, I didn’t kick – I started saying, please stop, please stop.’

Sokola told the Daily Mail that all she could do was plead with him because Weinstein ‘was so heavy that my leg was numb.’

‘As silly as it sounds right now, I was really hoping that hearing a 19-year-old basically begging [him] to stop and crying would stop him,’ she said.

‘Only a monster could do that… I have no idea how someone can get so turned on by fear because he saw that I was terrified, he saw that I was crying and shaking and wanting to get out of there and it seemed to make him want to do these things even more.’

Sokola told the court that when it was over, Weinstein told her: ‘That wasn’t so difficult, was it?’

When Weinstein left, she went back to her sister but didn’t tell her, or anyone, what allegedly happened to her for more than a decade.