Jury in Weinstein case seated.
A jury of seven men and five women was selected Friday for Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial after an arduous two-week process, setting the stage for testimony to begin in the next week.
The final tally mostly erased a gender imbalance that, just hours earlier, led to complaints by prosecutors that the defense was deliberately trying to keep young women off the panel.
“They are systematically eliminating a class of people from this jury,” prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon said.
The defense said it wasn’t specifically targeting young women, but didn’t want jurors who were too young to understand the way men and women interacted in the early 1990s.
“That was a different time in New York and on planet Earth,” Weinstein attorney Arthur Aidala said.
Weinstein, 67, ambling out of the courthouse, didn’t comment when asked his thoughts on jury selection. “Ask Donna!” he said, referring to lawyer Donna Rotunno. Three alternate jurors — one man and two women — also were seated and will sit through the trial and take the place of any jurors on the main panel who can’t make it through to deliberations.
Weinstein, the former studio boss behind such Oscar winners as “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love,” is charged with raping a woman in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and sexually assaulting another woman in 2006. He has pleaded not guilty and said any sexual activity was consensual. If convicted, he could face life in prison.
The tussle over juror gender comes amid a selection process that has been far from easy.
Weinstein’s case has attracted widespread public attention and catalyzed the #MeToo movement as dozens of women have come forward over the last two years with allegations of sexual misconduct. That’s made it tough for Weinstein’s lawyers, prosecutors and Burke to find a fair and impartial jury.
Each day for nearly a week, whenever Judge James Burke introduced Weinstein to a new batch of potential jurors and asked if they couldn’t be impartial, dozens of hands shot up.