On Thursday, former movie mogul and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison for gruesome sex crimes against a victim known at trial as Jane Doe 1. The crime occurred in 2013 in a Beverly Hills hotel room, and the victim, who was anonymous until today, first came forward in 2017.
Jane Doe 1 has unmasked herself to The Hollywood Reporter as Evgeniya Chernyshova. A former model who was born in Siberia, she now runs a floral-design company in Beverly Hills and has three children.
Chernyshova said she regrets going through the trial as an anonymous Jane Doe.
“I did it because I was ashamed and humiliated,” she said, speaking publicly for the first time. “I thought it was a good decision to protect my kids. But it was a horrible decision for myself, because I’ve been cut off from everyone. It isn’t right to go through this hell alone.”
She came forward with her case when her daughter Maria, then 16, told her about the sexual assaults she was suffering at school. Chernyshova, who saw Weinstein convicted on counts of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, and penetration by a foreign object, urged Maria to go to the police. But she refused, saying that her mother would never understand. She did understand, and so they made an alliance: Maria would report what happened to her if Chernyshova would tell the authorities her story of her 2013 rape.
Weinstein was previously convicted on sexual assault charges in New York in 2020 and sentenced to 23 years in prison.
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