A few days into Harvey Weinstein's first sexual assault trial in 2020, the lawyers for the prosecution spoke privately for the first time with a former model who said he forced her to have oral sex.

But the jury never heard about Kaja Sokola's accusation. Prosecutors said they were still investigating the claim when Weinstein was found guilty in February 2020 of charges based on what other women said.

On Wednesday, Sokola started sharing her story with a new jury.

Sokola didn't look at Weinstein as she walked past him to the witness stand in a New York courtroom. He is on trial again because a court said his earlier convictions for rape and sexual assault were wrong. Prosecutors also added a new sexual assault charge based on what Sokola said happened.

When she started talking about her life before the attack in 2006, Weinstein looked at her, with his right hand over his mouth.

Weinstein, who is 73, says he is not guilty of the charges. His lawyers say the women agreed to sex with him because they wanted movie and TV jobs. The defense also pointed out that the women kept in contact with him for some time after the events they talked about.

Sokola, a 39-year-old psychotherapist and writer from Poland, said she recently started a film company. She sued Weinstein after people in the film business started talking about how he treated women, and this became public accusations in 2017. This helped start the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment. Prosecutors have said Sokola eventually received $3.5 million.

Sokola said she was not interested in modeling, but in acting and writing, but her mother and sister thought she should join a modeling competition in Poland when she was 14. She won a contract with a modeling company and had to manage school and photo shoots at the same time.

She said the next two years taught her many things quickly. By 2002, when she was 16, she was in New York for modeling, without her family there.

Sokola will probably keep giving evidence in court on Thursday. She has not been asked about Weinstein yet. Prosecutors say she met him in New York in 2002 when she was there for a modeling trip.

In her lawsuits, Sokola said that soon after she met Weinstein, he asked her to lunch to talk about her job, but then he sexually assaulted her. The lawsuits said he sexually harassed and emotionally hurt her for years after that.

The criminal charge is about one time when Sokola says Weinstein forced her to have oral sex at a hotel in Manhattan in May 2006.

Prosecutors say it happened after Weinstein helped Sokola get a small part in the film “The Nanny Diaries.” He then met her older sister, who was visiting, and Sokola wanted to impress her sister.

"She was happy she knew him," her sister, Dr. Ewa Sokola, a heart doctor, told the jury on Wednesday.

She said the three of them met in a hotel lobby. They talked about Italian movies and about Weinstein's heart health, mentioning that he was a big man. Then he and the model left the table together.

Kaja Sokola was very nervous when she came back about 30 minutes later, like someone waiting for exam results or for the Oscars. But she didn't say anything about the sexual assault, Dr. Sokola told the jury.

She said she was surprised to find out about the claim more than ten years later, when she read about it in a magazine.

Weinstein's lawyers will have an opportunity to ask Kaja Sokola questions soon.

Prosecutors said they began investigating Sokola's claims after her lawyers called just before Weinstein's first trial. However, prosecutors stopped the investigation after he was found guilty and the coronavirus pandemic began.

The police started the Sokola investigation again after the top court in New York said Weinstein was not guilty.

Weinstein's lawyers tried to stop Sokola's statement from being used in the new trial, but they failed. They said the prosecutors were secretly adding another accusation to the case to make the other people who accused him seem more believable.

Another woman, Miriam Haley, said in court last week that Weinstein forced her to have oral sex with him in 2006. The third woman in the case, Jessica Mann, is expected to speak in court later.

The Associated Press usually doesn't name people who say they were sexually assaulted unless they give permission, and Haley, Mann, and Sokola gave their permission.