Weinstein pales at rape count
The man who pinned me down had handcuffs on him today
Rose McGowan
One of the first women to accuse Weinstein
● Handcuffed and ashen-faced, Harvey Weinstein appeared in a New York courtroom on Friday to face charges of rape and sexual assault, marking the downfall of a Hollywood titan.
It was a moment many of the women who had made allegations against the mogul, sparking a global movement, never thought they would see.
“The man who pinned me down had handcuffs on him today,” said Rose McGowan, one of the first women to accuse Weinstein in an October 2017 article in the New York Times.
Since the first women spoke out, more than 70 have accused the 66-year-old of sexual harassment and rape, and the #MeToo movement has seen allegations about many other public figures come to light.
Weinstein was already being investigated by police in London, Los Angeles and New York, but in New York police and federal agents were growing increasingly frustrated at the pace of progress, chafing at the seeming reluctance of the district attorney to move on with prosecution.
On Friday, district attorney Cyrus Vance finally made his move, agreeing with Weinstein’s lawyers that the New Yorker hand himself in at the Tribeca police station near his former home in Manhattan’s West Village.
Weinstein appeared relaxed as he walked into the station at 7.20am through a crowd of photographers and reporters held back by metal barriers. He carried under his arm two books, including a biography of director Elia Kazan, who became a notorious figure during the McCarthy era after helping root out suspected Hollywood communists.
He smiled for the press as he left the police station en route to court after having his fingerprints and mugshot taken. But his demeanour changed when he listened in court to the charges against him — rape in the first and third degrees from an incident in 2013, and a criminal sex act against another woman in 2004.
He grimaced as a New York assistant attorney described him as a man who “used his position, money and power to lure young women into situations where he was able to violate them sexually”.
It was unclear who had filed the rape charges, but the other charge is believed to relate to an accusation made by Lucia Evans, a former actress who claimed the studio boss forced her into oral sex during a business meeting. “They [police] said that if I do nothing, Harvey would walk,” Evans told a magazine. “I think the significance hit all at once.”
Weinstein was granted bail of $1-million (R12.4million) and made to surrender his passport and wear an electronic tag that restricts his movement.
Benjamin Brafman, Weinstein’s lawyer, described by the New Yorker as “the last of the big-time defence attorneys”, and the man who defended Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician and former managing director of the IMF who became embroiled in a sex scandal in 2011, said Weinstein would “vigorously defend himself” against the charges.
A number of allegations against Weinstein from women including Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow are thought to fall outside of the 10-year statute of limitations law that existed at the time of the alleged incidents. — © The Daily Telegraph, London