WEINSTEIN CONVICTED OF RAPE IN L.A. TRIAL
A Los Angeles jury on Monday found Harvey Weinstein guilty of raping a woman, delivering a verdict that further condemns the disgraced movie titan whose treatment of women helped spur the #MeToo movement.
The decision all but assures that the 70-year-old Weinstein, currently serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York for other rapes, will spend the rest of his life behind bars. He is scheduled to be sentenced in the Los Angeles case early next year, but must complete his current prison sentence before being transferred to California.
Following a trial that stretched over a month, jurors deliberated for more than nine days before returning to convict Weinstein of a count each of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, and sexual penetration by a foreign object. The charges stemmed from allegations made by a woman who came forward to report Weinstein for attacking her in a Beverly Hills hotel room.
The jury either acquitted Weinstein or could not reach a verdict on charges based on allegations of three other women who also accused him of sexual assaulting them in hotel rooms between 2004 and 2013.
Weinstein’s legal troubles in L.A. began on the eve of his Manhattan trial in January 2020, when prosecutors here brought an initial set of charges against him based on the allegations of two women. More charges would follow.
It was one of those first accusers, an Italian model identified in court as Jane Doe 1, on whose allegations the jury convicted Weinstein. She claimed Weinstein barged into her room at the Beverly Hills hotel she was staying in while attending a film festival to brutally assault her. She filed a report with Los Angeles
police in October 2017, not long after articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker detailed sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein that helped spark the #MeToo movement and ended the career of one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures.
The second woman, Lauren Young, accused Weinstein of luring her to a hotel suite with an offer to discuss a screenplay she’d written and then groping her in a bathroom while he masturbated. Young first detailed her alleged assault during the New York trial, where she was among several women who testified about socalled “prior bad acts” by Weinstein that were not part of the charges against him.
More than 100 women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct since 2017.
Following the initial charges, Weinstein was indicted last year on additional counts of sexual assault. Among that new group of accusers was Jennifer Siebel Newsom, now Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife, who alleged that Weinstein raped her during a meeting that was supposed to be about her nascent acting career.