Donna Rotunno: the legal Rottweiler leading Harvey Weinstein’s defense
At the end of the first day of the Harvey Weinstein trial in New York, after prosecutors had described the defendant to the jury as a predatory monster who sexually attacked numerous women, the fallen titan of Hollywood was asked whether he was feeling confident.
After all, he is looking at spending the rest of his life behind bars.
“Very confident,” Weinstein shot back as he trundled past reporters in the New York supreme court, leaning heavily – in pain or as role-play, nobody quite knows – on his signature walking frame. “I got great lawyers.”
He might have said, “I got a great lawyer.” For the tone and tactics of his defense – and with it the likely outcome of his trial – depend in large part on one woman, the Chicago-based legal Rottweiler, Donna Rotunno.
It is a measure of Rotunno’s commanding presence in court No 99 that she is attracting almost as much public attention as her celebrity client. She appears every day in court sharply decked out in Salvatore Ferragamo dresses or leather skirts, Jimmy Choo heels and a gold necklace with pendant stating: “Not guilty.”
The same sharp style applies to the men in her defense team. Her deputy, Arthur Aidala, sports check suits, blue silk pocket handkerchiefs, cashmere coat and trilby.
Like everything Rotunno does, her look is entirely conscious and designed for maximum effect with the jury. “Jurors appreciate people taking pride in how you dress,” she told a hometown newspaper before the trial began.
If that sounds a little old-school, it is. What is so striking about the defense that Rotunno, 44, is spearheading is how conventional, retrograde, it is, almost as though the #MeToo movement never happened.
It was the revelations in October 2017 that Weinstein had spent huge sums to silence several women accusers that sparked the #MeToo movement. Not that you’d know that when Rotunno cross-examines one of the six women testifying that he sexually assaulted them.
Last week, Rotunno reduced one of the two main accusers in the trial, who alleges she was raped by Weinstein in a New York hotel in 2013, to uncontrollable sobbing during a total of nine hours of relentless grilling over two days. On the first of those days, the presiding judge had to halt proceedings after the witness suffered a panic attack.
Rotunno had been firing questions at her like bullets, ending each query with a shotgun “Correct?” “You were manipulating Mr Weinstein so you’d get invited to fancy parties, correct?” “You wanted to benefit from the power, correct?” “You wanted to use his power, correct?”
The lawyer self-identifies as the “ultimate feminist”, but again you wouldn’t know that from her courtroom posture. She has deployed all the old shibboleths that have been used over decades to discredit sex crimes accusers.
The witness was after the money, she was a serial liar, she may not have wanted sex with Weinstein but she did it anyway to get on in the film business – all those arguments and insinuations have been used by Rotunno and her henchmen.
Most extraordinarily, she has turned the very core of #MeToo – the notion that powerful men wield and abuse their power to force sex on women – on its head, suggesting to the jury that it was the six accusers who were the ones doing the manipulating and that the victim here was Weinstein.
Rotunno has been quite transparent that this is her gameplan. In pretrial interviews, she stated bluntly that “I look at it the exact opposite way” to the prosecution. “Harvey Weinstein was the guy that held the keys to the castle that everyone wanted to get into. And what people did was they used him, and used him, and used him.”
In choosing Rotunno to head up his defense, Weinstein himself must have signed up to this antiquated approach. He ditched two groups of defense lawyers headed by men in order to bring on Rotunno, saying he expressly wanted a woman to represent him when the chips were down.
It may turn out to be an inspired decision, but the stakes are enormously high and the risks great. Weinstein faces five counts – two of rape, one of forcing oral sex on a former production assistant Miriam Haley, and two of predatory sexual assault, which carries the maximum sentence of life in prison.
In her favor, Rotunno, who began as a prosecutor but then switched to defending men accused of sex crimes, has a formidable record. She has represented 40 male defendants in sex crimes trials, and lost only once.
But what works in Chicago may not necessarily go down so well in front of a jury composed of seven male and five female New Yorkers, all of whom have been soaked in the shifting gender dynamics of #MeToo.
“In a place like New York, with more liberal people friendlier to #MeToo, they may not respond well to a woman lawyer attacking another woman witness who is clearly hurting and in pain,” said Michelle Simpson Tuegel, a former criminal defense attorney who now represents victims of sexual assault. “Nine hours, uncontrollable sobbing – it seems like torture.”
Sarah Ann Masse, one of the silence breakers who have come forward to accuse Weinstein of sexual misconduct, was dismayed by the defense’s approach.
“It is egregious that a survivor testifying in court to bring her abuser to justice should have to endure the vicious shaming, blaming and taunting that so many women face on the stand. These tactics are nothing more than a naked attempt to browbeat survivors into giving up on telling the truth, and ultimately deter other brave survivors from coming forward.”
Rotunno has remained utterly unfazed by such criticisms. “I don’t take pride in having to put people through circumstances they find difficult,” she told the New York Times podcast, The Daily, published on Friday. “That’s not the point of what I do. My job is to ask questions – there’s always more than one side to a story.”
She went on to expound her highly controversial view that in the #MeToo era power relations have swung so far in the direction of women that men can now falsely be accused of sexual misconduct and have no redress. “We have created a society of celebrity victimhood, where women don’t have to take any responsibility for their actions.”
Asked whether she had herself ever been sexually assaulted, she replied, to the astonishment of the interviewer: “I have not. Because I never put myself in that position.”