Weinstein guilty verdict a turning point
There were many points in Hollywood predator/producer Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial when it was possible to think that maybe not much had changed after all.
Oh, here comes the same old tired defense, so high priced and yet straight off the rack. And there goes the same old creaky demand that the victim explain why she didn’t run. Or scratch him, or poke his eyes out.
But then, in more of a miracle than if Weinstein had ditched his walker and dashed up the courthouse steps, it turned out that Monday really was, as Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said, “a big day” and “a new day” for all survivors of sexual violence.
The women who testified about what Weinstein had done to them, Vance said, have “changed the course of history” and “pulled our criminal justice system into the 21st century.”
First, Vance himself had to be pulled. Five years ago, he declined to prosecute Weinstein on a groping charge, even after hearing audio of a confession.
But this finally is a new day for victims. Because while most of us who’ve been attacked never hear the word “guilty” applied to our rapists, we did see at least partial justice done.
What more than 90 women did in coming forward, what six women did in testifying and what three reporters did in bringing this story to light showed that even the most prolific, powerful abuser can be brought to account.
Together, they stopped this one “vicious, serial sexual predator,” as Vance called him. And proved, as the DA said, that cross-examinations tearing into victims and survivors “will no longer work in this day and age.”
That last part is the best news of all. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who worried that despite all the evidence against Weinstein, he’d skate and give victims one more reason not to report or speak up or ever ever trust the system.
But then, he didn’t. All of his money and all of his machinations (it isn’t every woman-hating thug who has the means to hire former Mossad agents to dig up dirt on his victims) couldn’t erase the truth of their testimony.
In the end, the jury saw past Weinstein lawyer Donna Rotunno’s attempts to put her client’s victims on trial.
Jurors saw past the ancient argument that this was just “regret renamed as rape.” They saw past Rotunno’s shameless Newsweek op-ed asking them to “look past the headlines.”
She asked them to “do what they know is right.” And they did, and found him guilty of a criminal sexual act against a former production assistant and of rape in the third degree against a former actress who had a full blown panic attack on the witness stand.
The jury also found him not guilty of first-degree rape and two counts of predatory sexual assault. But he is in jail now. He is a convicted felon who will never violate another woman. He’ll never again send a target a box of chocolate penises, or kill a career, or make a woman so anguished that she paints a wall red with her own blood.
“You’ll never make it in this business,” Dawn Dunning, one woman who tried to escape him, said Weinstein told her. “This is how this industry works.” Or it was, anyway.
Melinda Henneberger, an editorial writer and columnist for The Kansas City Star, is a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.