Netf lix producer ‘sent warm messages’ to mogul – AFTER he allegedly raped her
ONE of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers sent him hundreds of warm messages – including one reading ‘I’m thinking about you’ a day after he allegedly raped her.
Alexandra Canosa is said to have sent the email in 2010 and another the following year saying: ‘Miss you too. Love to you and the girls.’
Miss Canosa, who says the film-maker repeatedly attacked her between 2010 and 2017, also called him her ‘mentor and friend’ in other messages.
Miss Canosa is suing Weinstein in Manhattan’s Supreme Court in a civil case that is separate from the criminal allegations against him.
The emails were published in the New York Post the day before a damning book about Weinstein’s downfall was
due to be published. In 2013 Miss Canosa, who worked at The Weinstein Company for a decade and produced the Netflix series ‘Marco Polo’, wrote Weinstein a message beginning ‘hi love’.
It read: ‘You have been my mentor and friend for many years now and have never failed to give me the right advice. I am trying to figure out what my next step should be for my career as a whole and I trust your guidance completely’. She signed it: ‘Love, Ally.’
In January 2017 Miss Canosa also sent Weinstein a message of consolation after his mother died, signing off with: ‘Warmest, Ally’. Miss Canosa’s lawyer Jeremy Hellman said in a letter to the judge that Weinstein’s lawyers were ‘trying to manipulate and misuse these emails out of context’.
But Weinstein’s lawyer Elior Shiloh said ‘the truth was finally coming out’. He called her lawsuit a ‘slap in the face to actual victims of sexual violence’.
Weinstein is due to go on trial in January on two counts of predatory sexual assault, one count of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and two counts of rape.
They relate to raping an unidentified woman in his hotel room in 2013 and forcing himself on Mimi Haleyi, a production assistant, at his apartment in 2006. Prosecutors plan to call four other women to show a pattern of behaviour by Weinsten – a legal tactic which led to Bill Cosby being convicted during a retrial.