Filmmaker Weinstein convicted of sex crimes
NEW YORK >> Harvey Weinstein, the powerhouse film producer whose downfall over sexual misconduct ignited a global movement, was found guilty of two felony sex crimes Monday after a trial at which six women testified that he sexually assaulted them.
A Manhattan jury convicted Weinstein of rape and criminal sexual act but acquitted him on three other counts, including the two most serious charges against him: being a sexual predator.
Weinstein sat motionless as the verdict was read.
“But, I’m innocent,” he said three times to his lawyers, appearing stunned a few minutes later when he was handcuffed and two court officers led him off to jail to await sentencing. He was taken first to Bellevue Medical Center by ambulance after complaining of chest pains and showing signs
of high blood pressure, his representatives said.
Sexual misconduct complaints about Weinstein, an Oscar-winning producer of films like “Shakespeare in Love,” had circulated for years, but exposés published by The New York Times and The New Yorker opened the floodgates in late 2017.
Scores of women went public with accusations that Weinstein had sexually assaulted or harassed them, while thousands more shared similar stories on social media about abuse by powerful men. Weinstein quickly became a symbol not just of Hollywood’s casting-couch culture, but also of what women had endured in all kinds of workplaces for years.
For many, Weinstein’s trial in state Supreme Court in Manhattan was a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement and a crucial test in the effort to hold influential men accountable for sexual misconduct. He faces a prison sentence of up to 29 years.
Dozens of Weinstein’s victims and women’s rights groups celebrated the conviction, saying it heralded a new era of empowerment for women.
“This verdict made it real for people watching from afar that you will be held accountable for your actions,” said Dawn Dunning, a former actress who testified at the trial. “You can’t take advantage of people just because you have power and money.”
The criminal charges brought against Weinstein, 67, in Manhattan rested narrowly on the complaints of two women: Miriam Haley, a production assistant who said he had forced oral sex on her in 2006; and Jessica Mann, a former actress who said he had raped her at a hotel in 2013.
Jurors also had to consider the testimony of actress Annabella Sciorra, who said that Weinstein raped her in the early 1990s, in deciding whether to convict him of being a sexual predator. As part of prosecutors’ effort to establish a pattern of behavior, three other women testified about what they said were his assaults against them, but he was not charged over the events they described.
But the jury found him not guilty on two counts of predatory sexual assault, suggesting they had doubts about Sciorra’s accusation.
Jurors left the courthouse without commenting to reporters and were ferried away in a government van. Hours later, the foreman, Bernard Cody, speaking from home, would say only that the deliberations had been exhausting. “It was stressful,” he said. “The whole thing was long, long.”
The case was unusually risky for the district attorney’s office. There was no physical or forensic evidence to support the women’s allegations, turning the trial into a battle over their credibility.
Prosecutors portrayed Weinstein as a calculated predator who kept his victims close after attacking them in an effort to control them, using his power over their careers to silence them.
But defense lawyers said the women had willingly had sex with Weinstein to further their careers. Only years later, his lawyers said, after Weinstein had become a symbol of the #MeToo movement, did the women say their encounters with him were not consensual.
The defense presented evidence that Haley and Mann not only had friendly communications with Weinstein after they said they were attacked, but also had consensual sex with him.
After deliberating for five days the jury, seven men and five women, determined that Weinstein had broken the law.
The verdict was a victory for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., whose legacy is likely to largely be defined by the outcome of the case. He came under heavy public pressure to prosecute Weinstein after declining to do so in 2015, when an Italian model said the producer had groped her breasts at a business meeting.
The earlier decision came back to haunt Vance in late 2017 when dozens of women came forward to accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct. The district attorney became a target of protests, even as Weinstein went on trial last month.
After the verdict was announced, Vance said that the women who testified against Weinstein “changed the course of history in the fight against sexual violence” and that society owed them “an immense debt.”
“The women, who came forward courageously and at great risk, made that happen,” he said. Weinstein, he added, was “a vicious serial sexual predator who used his power to threaten, rape, assault, trick, humiliate and silence his victims.”
Weinstein’s lawyers said they would appeal the conviction, as well as the judge’s decision to hold their client in jail until his sentencing, which is set for March 11.
“We’re going to fight,” Donna Rotunno, his lead lawyer, said.
Weinstein also faces a criminal trial in Los Angeles, where he has been charged with several felonies stemming from accusations by two women who say he sexually assaulted them.
From the start, much about the story of Weinstein’s mistreatment of women had been outsize, including the number of accusers — at least 90 — to the range of the misconduct they said he had engaged in: from lewd propositions and unwanted touching to forced oral sex and rape.
But authorities in New York faced hurdles in building a case, law enforcement officials said. Many of the crimes Weinstein was accused of happened outside the state. Others happened too long ago to prosecute. Some of the accusers were unwilling to testify.
The case that Vance’s office ultimately brought in May 2018 was challenging for prosecutors to prove, in part because two of the three accusers continued to see Weinstein after what they said were his attacks.
Charges related to the third woman were thrown out because, prosecutors said, the lead detective on the case had withheld evidence from them that could have been used to discredit the woman’s account.
To bolster their weakened case, prosecutors got permission last summer from the judge overseeing the trial, Justice James Burke, to include a rape accusation by Sciorra, an actress known for her work on “The Sopranos.”
Sciorra, 59, testified that after giving her a ride home from a dinner party in the early 1990s, Weinstein had pushed his way into her apartment and violently raped her even as she kicked and punched him.
The encounter had happened too long ago to be the basis for a separate rape charge, but prosecutors used it to support charges of predatory sexual assault, which required them to prove that Weinstein had committed a serious sex crime against at least two women.
Actress Rosie Perez backed up Sciorra’s testimony, recounting how Sciorra had told her at the time, “I think I was raped,” and had later identified Weinstein as her attacker.
Burke also allowed prosecutors to call the three other women — Dunning, Tarale Wulff and Lauren Young — who said that Weinstein had lured them into private meetings, either at hotels or at his apartment, under the pretense of discussing job opportunities, and had then sexually assaulted them. At the time, they were actresses trying to get film parts.
Weinstein was not charged based on those accounts, which involved events that were too old or happened in other jurisdictions, but the women were allowed to testify to establish what prosecutors said was a pattern of abuse. A similar legal strategy led to a conviction in the sexual assault trial of comedian Bill Cosby in Pennsylvania.
The defense called friends of Mann’s and Sciorra’s who said that the women had never described their experiences with Weinstein as rape. His lawyers also stressed during cross-examination that Sciorra could not recall the date of the assault and could not explain how Weinstein got past a doorman and to her apartment.