HARV BID TO TOSS CASE
Accuser & I were ‘consensual’
Harvey Weinstein on Friday asked a judge to throw out rape and sex-assault charges against him, claiming prosecutors hid the fact that he had a “long-term, consensual” relationship with one of his accusers.
Evidence presented by lawyers for the disgraced movie mogul includes an e-mail in which he says the unidentified woman told him: “I love you, always do. But I hate feeling like a booty call. :)”
Court papers say she sent the e-mail on Feb. 8, 2017, nearly four years after Weinstein is accused of raping her on March 18, 2013.
The message is one of dozens that Weinstein says contain “exculpatory evidence” the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office withheld from the grand jury that indicted him on charges that could send him to prison for life.
Court papers cite a message sent on April 19, 2013 — little more than a month after the alleged sex attack — in which the woman allegedly told Weinstein: “Text or call me on saturday, ill be done around 9pm i believe earliest. We can work something out from there?”
Four e-mails from late October 2013 allegedly show the woman asking to meet up with Weinstein, with one saying: “Depending on when I finish, I could swing by soho on my way home?”
The 159-page Manhattan Supreme Court filing claims prosecutors “violated all sense of fair dealing by presenting the Grand Jury with an incomplete and misleading impression” of the woman’s “contact and communications” with Weinstein.
“This flawed presentation, we submit, knowingly allowed the Grand Jury to receive a materially incomplete picture of the ev- idence known to exist in this case, namely the long-term, consensual, intimate relationship between CW-1 (the alleged victim) and Mr. Weinstein,” defense lawyers wrote.
Court papers also say “outside pressure and political influences” led Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. to seek Weinstein’s indictment in the woman’s alleged rape.
The first exhibit attached to Weinstein’s motion is a Post front page with a mock “wanted” poster with Weinstein’s face on it.
In a statement, lead defense lawyer Benjamin Brafman said the e-mails “corroborate Mr. Weinstein’s factual innocence.”
“These communications irrefutably reflect the true nature of this consensual intimate friendship, which never at any time included a forcible rape,” Brafman said.
Friday’s court filing raised the specter of Brafman’s 2011 victory over DA Vance during the highprofile prosecution of French politician Dominique StraussKahn for an alleged sex attack on a Times Square hotel maid.
That case fell apart after DSK’s Brafman-led defense team claimed to have information that would “gravely undermine” accuser Nafissatou Diallo’s credibility and investigators found she’d repeatedly lied to authorities.
Weinstein’s motion to dismiss the case against him also came a day after BuzzFeed published an interview in which Vance said he was blind-sided by the #MeToo movement that erupted in the wake of published allegations of sex abuse and harassment against the Hollywood titan.
“I frankly was not aware of the extent to which workplace sexual violence existed, and perhaps I should have been,” Vance said.
A Vance spokesman declined to comment.