A New York jury found Harvey Weinstein guilty of one of three charges he was facing during his retrial on Wednesday. It found him guilty of one count of a criminal sexual act but not guilty on another count of a criminal sexual act. It reached no verdict on one charge of rape, according to The New York Times.
Following a trial that began on April 23, closing arguments concluded June 3. The case was then turned over to the jury, who handed over the verdicts, concluding five days of deliberations. A sentencing date was not available at time of publication. “He will serve the California sentence first, as it is now his primary sentence,” said Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, according to the Times.
In the days leading up to the decision, bickering among jury members appeared to delay the verdict. “I feel like they are attacking, talking together, fight together. I don’t like it,” the foreperson said, according to a transcript with Judge Curtis Farber. “I feel it is not fair taking the decision about the past.”
The prosecutor on the case, Matthew Colangelo, argued that the concerns weren’t enough for a mistrial since some aspects of the mogul’s past were allowed into evidence.
In the first 2020 case, Weinstein was convicted on two out of five charges, one for a felony sex crime, the other for third-degree rape. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison, but last spring an appeals court overturned the conviction. The ruling stated that prosecutors should not have been allowed to let some of Weinstein’s other accusers, whose allegations were not related to the charges he faced, testify.
In Weinstein’s retrial, prosecutors again focused on the testimony of two of the three women from the initial trial — Jessica Mann and Miriam Haley — as well as added a new sex-crime charge involving a third women, who was identified for the first time as Kaja Sokola.
Sokola, a former model from Poland, accused Weinstein of assaulting her at a Manhattan hotel room in 2006. She claimed that Weinstein told her he wanted to show her some movie scripts, but when they were alone, he allegedly pinned her onto a bed and forcibly performed oral sex on her.
Love Music?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in Australian/New Zealand music and globally.
Attorneys for the women did not immediately return Rolling Stone’s requests for comment. Weinstein’s lawyer also did not immediately send a comment.
In addition to the New York retrial, Weinstein was previously also convicted of rape and sexual assault, and sentenced to 16 years in prison, in a separate California case. He’s filed an appeal in that case, as well.
Weinstein previously claimed he was battling bone marrow cancer along with a host of other health issues that has kept him in and out of prison hospitals. “I’m in a serious emergency situation, I’m begging for you to move your date,” Weinstein told the judge at a hearing prior to his retrial. “I need to get out of this hellhole as quickly as possible.”
The mogul expressed remorse for his family in an interview with New York City’s Fox station last week but not for the women he allegedly assaulted. “I regret [that] I put my family through this, that I put my wife through this, that I acted immorally, that I put so many friends through this,” he said. “I hurt people that were close to me by actions that were stupid but never illegal, never criminal, never anything.”
“I am so deeply grateful to the jury. The defense set a disruptive and chaotic tone from the start of this trial—which I suppose was meant to distract the jury from undeniable facts, and I’m so thankful they saw through the antics and nonsense,” Miriam Haley, on whose charges Weinstein was found guilty, said in a statement to Rolling Stone.
“Testifying in the face of constant disruptions, victim-shaming, and deliberate attempts to distort the truth was exhausting and, at times, dehumanizing. But today’s verdict gives me hope. Hope that there is a new awareness around sexual violence, and that the myth of the ‘perfect victim’ is fading.”
Kaja Sokola said in a statement, “I am relieved that Harvey Weinstein will be held accountable for some of his crimes and I thank the District Attorney’s office for their dedication to this case. Harvey Weinstein will remain behind bars and that is a win…I owed it to myself, and to the other women who survived him, to make sure that the world knows what kind of man Harvey Weinstein is. Speaking out was an act of power and it allowed me to reclaim the pride and confidence he tried to take from me.”
Jessica Mann, who accusations against Weinstein resulted in a deadlocked “no verdict” on rape charges at the second trial — Weinstein was acquitted of Mann-related charges during the first trial, as the two were in a “relationship” at the time of the alleged rape — said in a statement to Rolling Stone following second trial, “I would never lie about rape or use something so traumatic to hurt someone. Rape can happen in relationships – and in dynamics where power and manipulation control the narrative. Some victims survive by appeasing, and many carry deep empathy, even for their abusers. That’s part of the trap.”
“Even in my dynamic with Harvey – the lack of a ‘seductress’ is under-discussed and the evidence that usually follows a person with those intentions. The smear campaign built around me is hollow. The evidence doesn’t exist because the propaganda isn’t real. It’s the nuances I fight to have heard while I’m objected at when answering in the courtroom,” Mann continued.
“Coming forward cost me everything. My privacy, my safety. I laid bare my trauma, my shame – everything I’d tried to bury just to keep living. Still, I stood up and told the truth. Again and again. Harvey hides behind PR firms, lawyers, spy agencies contracted to intimidate. I’ve had only my voice.”
From Rolling Stone US
