Weinstein’s lawyer says his accusers had a choice
>>A lawyer for Harvey Weinstein told jurors on Thursday that he was the victim of an “overzealous prosecution” and that prosecutors were acting like moviemakers, inventing an alternative world in which women are not responsible for their own behaviour.
During a five-hour closing argument, the lawyer, Donna Rotunno, argued that Weinstein’s accusers had chosen to engage in consensual and often transactional relationships with him to advance their own careers.
Ms Rotunno said prosecutors from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office had woven “a sinister tale” during Weinstein’s rape trial, depicting him as a monster and his accusers as innocent, passive victims. But, she asserted, the prosecution lacked the evidence to prove it.
“In their story, they have created a universe that strips adult women of common sense, autonomy and responsibility,” she said. “In their universe, women are not responsible for the parties they attend, the men they flirt with, the choices they make to further their own careers, the hotel room invitations, the plane tickets they accept, the jobs they ask for help to obtain.”
The trial is widely seen as a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement, which gained momentum in October 2017 after Weinstein was publicly accused of assaulting and harassing numerous women.
Weinstein, 67, a former powerhouse producer in Hollywood known for films like Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love, has pleaded not guilty to five felony charges, including rape, criminal sexual assault and predatory sexual assault. Prosecutors were to present closing remarks yesterday. The jury of seven men and five women will begin deliberating on Tuesday.
Ms Rotunno said her client had become “a target of a cause and of a movement”. She implored the jury not to give in to public pressure, but to focus on the facts in the case.
“You don’t have to like Mr Weinstein — this is not a popularity contest. But you have to remember that we are not here to criminalise morality,” Ms Rotunno said, adding moments later: “If you had to look at the evidence alone from their prospective, they lose.”
For a month, Weinstein listened as six women took the stand and testified that he had sexually assaulted them. He declined to testify himself.
He faces charges based on the allegations of only two of his accusers: Jessica Mann, a former actress who testified that he raped her in a midtown Manhattan hotel in 2013, and Miriam
Haley, a former production assistant on his show Project Runway, who said he forced oral sex on her at his Tribeca apartment in 2006.
Both women acknowledged on cross-examination that they not only had friendly communications with Weinstein after their alleged attacks, but later had consensual sex with him.
The presiding judge, Justice James M Burke, allowed four other women to testify about their own encounters so that prosecutors can establish a pattern of behaviour, even though their allegations are too old to be charged as crimes under New York state law. Actress Annabella Sciorra, for instance, took the stand under the legal theory that her testimony would support the charges of predatory sexual assault, which carry a life sentence.
Sciorra testified that Weinstein pushed his way into her apartment and raped her after giving her a ride home from a dinner party in the early 1990s. The other accusers — Tarale Wulff, Dawn Dunning and Lauren Young — were all aspiring actresses who said Weinstein lured them to hotels on the pretence of helping their careers and then sexually assaulted them.
Over and over, Ms Rotunno returned to her central theme that Weinstein’s accusers were not passive victims of assaults, but active participants in consensual acts. “Women have choices,” she said.
Ms Rotunno said Haley’s relationship with Weinstein was something close to a romance, which began after he snagged the Project Runway job. “They have to label it as a professional relationship because if they labelled it as what it was, we wouldn’t be here,” Ms Rotunno said.
Haley had also used Weinstein to further her career, Ms Rotunno said, and had kept in touch with him through seemingly friendly emails well after she said he had attacked her. One email
“This is not rape. This is not sexual assault. This is someone who agrees to do what had been discussed. WEINSTEIN LAWYER, DONNA ROTUNNO
asked how Weinstein was doing and was signed “lots of love”.
“She was using him for jobs,” Ms Rotunno said.
Ms Rotunno argued that what Mann had described as a rape was sex between consenting adults. She said the evidence showed that Mann went willingly to Weinstein’s hotel room, got undressed and laid down on his bed. Mann never tried to stop Weinstein and after the encounter, the lawyer said, she went to brunch with him.
“This is not rape,” Ms Rotunno said. “This is not sexual assault. This is someone who agrees to do what had been discussed.”
Ms Rotunno highlighted dozens of friendly and sometimes flirtatious emails Mann had sent to Weinstein from 2013 to 2017. Each time Mann got a new telephone number, Rotunno noted, she made sure Weinstein had it.
“Five or six times she says, ‘Oh, here’s my new number,’” Ms Rotunno said.
Sciorra, who gave some of the strongest testimony, had misremembered what happened, the defence lawyer argued. She pointed to evidence the actress had told a friend at the time that “she did something crazy” with Weinstein, but did not describe the encounter as rape.
Yet when a reporter reached out to Sciorra in 2017 about Weinstein’s treatment of women, Ms Rotunno said: “She has changed her memories and now she was raped. Now she is the darling of a movement.”
Ms Rotunno said Young, Wulff and Dunning had also changed their stories over time, and she suggested they came forward only in the interest of fame.
She urged the jurors to consider how Weinstein’s accusers behaved and what they said in communications with him. The prosecution, she said, had created a fictional world — a “story that they spun” — where “women have no free will and no choice.”
“In that world, facts don’t matter,” Ms Rotunno said. “In this world, facts matter. Evidence matters.”