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Harvey Weinstein Is Found Guilty of Sex Crimes in #MeToo Watershed
The jury found Mr. Weinstein guilty of two felony sex crimes but acquitted him of charges that he is a sexual predator.
transcript
Lawyers for Weinstein and His Accusers Speak Out After Verdict
Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of rape and criminal sexual act, but was acquitted of the most serious charges against him. He faces a possible sentence of between five and 29 years.
“I could say that, right now, I’m happy to see that those years that I lost of my life are getting back. Of course, there is a lot of work to do. And I’m here to, you know, being there and speak to people so that situations like this will never happen again, and yeah, this is my mission right now.” “It’s no longer business as usual in the United States. This is the age of empowerment of women. And you cannot intimidate them anymore because women will not be silenced. They will speak up. They will have their voice. They will stand up and be subjected to your small army of defense attorneys, cross-examining them, attempting to discredit them, humiliate them, shame them, and they will still stand in their truth. So Harvey Weinstein, this justice has been a long time coming, but it’s finally here.” “It’s a bittersweet day, we’re disappointed. We knew we came in, and we were down 35 to nothing the day that we started this trial. The jurors came in knowing everything that they could know about this case. We couldn’t find a juror that never heard of Harvey Weinstein. You know, Harvey is strong. As I said, obviously he’s disappointed. But he’s strong, he’s mentally tough and he’s going to continue to fight.” “He didn’t react emotionally. There was no crying or anything like that. All he kept saying over and over again was, ‘I’m innocent, I’m innocent. How could this happen in America, I’m innocent?’”
Harvey Weinstein, the powerhouse film producer whose downfall over sexual misconduct ignited a global movement, was found guilty of two felony sex crimes after a trial in which six women testified that he had sexually assaulted them.
The jury found Mr. Weinstein guilty of rape and criminal sexual act but acquitted him of three other counts, including the two most serious charges against him — that he is a sexual predator.
Mr. Weinstein sat motionless and displayed little emotion as the verdict was read. “But, I’m innocent,” the producer repeated three times to his lawyers. Minutes later, he appeared stunned as he was handcuffed and led out of court, limping between two court officers on his way to jail to await sentencing. He faces a possible sentence of between five and 29 years.
Complaints about Mr. Weinstein, an Oscar-winning producer of films including “Shakespeare in Love,” had opened the floodgates in late 2017, as hundreds of thousands of women aired their own stories of harassment. Mr. Weinstein quickly became a symbol not just of the casting couch culture in Hollywood, but of the abuse women had endured for hundreds of years.
And for many, the trial was a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement and a crucial test in the effort to hold influential men accountable for sexual harassment in the workplace.
The criminal charges brought in Manhattan against Mr. Weinstein, 67, 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 alleged he had raped her at a hotel in 2013.
Jurors also had to consider the testimony of the actress Annabella Sciorra, who said Mr. Weinstein had raped her in the early 1990s, in deciding whether he was a sexual predator. Three other women were allowed give their accounts of alleged assaults to establish a pattern of behavior, but Mr. Weinstein was not charged in those incidents.
But the jury found him not guilty on two counts of predatory sexual assault, suggesting they had doubts about Ms. Sciorra’s allegation.
After the jury foreman delivered the verdict, Justice James M. Burke thanked the jurors for their “care and concentration” before they left the courtroom. As they filed out, Juror No. 6 stared at Mr. Weinstein. Justice Burke immediately sent Mr. Weinstein to jail to await sentencing on March 11, denying his request to be sent home for medical reasons.
The case, heard in State Supreme Court, was an unusually risky one for Manhattan prosecutors, who had little or no physical or forensic evidence to support the women’s allegations. The trial turned into a battle over the women’s credibility.
Donna Rotunno, the lead defense lawyer, tried to put the #MeToo movement on trial, arguing that public outrage over Mr. Weinstein’s behavior had stripped him of a career and branded him as a rapist without due process. He was, she said, “a target of a cause and of a movement.”
Prosecutors portrayed Mr. Weinstein as a calculated predator who kept his victims close after his attacks to control them, using his power over their futures in the film industry to silence them.
“The power imbalance he deviously exploited was not just physical, it was also professional and profoundly psychological,” one of the prosecutors, Meghan Hast, said in her opening statement.
But defense lawyers said the women had sex with Mr. Weinstein willingly to further their careers. Only years later, they said, after he had been accused of sexual harassment in The New York Times and The New Yorker, did the women say their encounters with him were not consensual.
The defense presented evidence that Ms. Haley and Ms. Mann not only had friendly communications with Mr. Weinstein after the alleged attacks, but also had consensual sex with him.
But after deliberating for five days the jury of seven men and five women determined that Mr. Weinstein had broken the law.
The verdict was a victory for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., whose legacy turned on the outcome of the case. He had come under heavy political pressure to bring charges against Mr. Weinstein after he had declined to prosecute him in 2015, after allegations the producer had groped an Italian model during a business meeting.
That decision came back to haunt Mr. Vance in late 2017 when dozens of women came forward to accuse Mr. Weinstein of sexual misconduct; some of the allegations dated back decades. Once considered an ally by feminists, Mr. Vance became the target of protests, even as jurors began to hear testimony against Mr. Weinstein last month.
With his legacy as district attorney and his political future in the balance, Mr. Vance sat in on the trial most days. After the verdict, he said in the hallway outside the courtroom that the women who had testified against Mr. Weinstein had “changed the course of history in the fight against sexual violence.”
“Harvey Weinstein is a vicious sexual predator” who has “used his power to trick, assault and humiliate his victims,” Mr. Vance said. “To the survivors of Harvey Weinstein, I owe, and we all owe, an immense debt to you.”
From the start, much about the story of Mr. Weinstein’s mistreatment of women had been outsize, from the number of women who accused him — at least 90 — to the range of the alleged misconduct: everything from lewd propositions and unwanted touching to forced oral sex and rape.
But the authorities in New York faced hurdles in putting together a case, law enforcement officials said. Many of the alleged crimes happened outside the state. Others were too old to prosecute under the statute of limitations. Some of the women were not willing to testify.
The criminal case Mr. Vance’s office brought in May 2018 was challenging for prosecutors to prove, in part because two of the three accusers had continued to see Mr. Weinstein after the alleged assaults.
Then, 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 the weakened case, prosecutors won permission last summer from Justice James M. Burke, the judge overseeing the trial, to include a rape allegation from Ms. Sciorra, the actress known for her work on “The Sopranos.”
Though the incident had happened too long ago to be the basis of a separate rape charge, prosecutors sought to use it to support charges of predatory sexual assault, which carry a penalty of life in prison. Those charges require the state to prove that Mr. Weinstein committed a serious sex crime against at least two women.
Ms Sciorra, 59, testified Mr. Weinstein had pushed his way into her apartment in the early 1990s, after he gave her a ride home from a dinner party, and violently raped her even as she kicked and punched him.
The actress Rosie Perez backed up her testimony, recounting how Ms. Sciorra had told her at the time, “I think I was raped,” and had later identified Mr. Weinstein as her attacker.
Justice Burke also allowed prosecutors to call three women — Tarale Wulff, Dawn Dunning and Lauren Young — who said Mr. Weinstein lured them into private meetings, either at hotels or at his apartment, under the pretense of discussing job opportunities, then sexually assaulted them. At the time, they were aspiring actresses trying to get film parts.
One of those incidents happened in Los Angeles, and two were barred by New York State’s statute of limitations. Still, the judge allowed the women, who had all been working as waitresses or models, to testify to establish a pattern of abuse — the legal strategy led to a conviction in the sexual assault trial of the comedian Bill Cosby in Pennsylvania.
The defense called friends of Ms. Mann’s and Ms. Sciorra’s, who said the women had never described their experiences with Mr. Weinstein as rape. Ms. Sciorra, the defense suggested during cross-examination, had misremembered what happened, noting that she could not recall the date of the assault, nor explain how Mr. Weinstein got past a doorman and to her apartment.
Defense lawyers also introduced scores of friendly and sometimes flirtatious emails showing that Ms. Mann and Ms. Haley maintained relationships with Mr. Weinstein for years after the alleged attacks.
In one message to a friend, for instance, Ms. Mann described Mr. Weinstein as “a pseudo father” who had given her “all the validation” she needed. In another, she bragged about performing oral sex on a “super rich producer” who could ruin careers.
Ms. Mann, 34, acknowledged under three days of grueling questioning that her romantic relationship with Mr. Weinstein was “complicated and different.” At one point, she became inconsolable when it came out in court she had been sexually abused when she was young. She said that she last had sex with Mr. Weinstein in 2016, after he asked her to console him because his mother had died.
“It does not change the fact that he raped me,” she said.
Ms. Haley, 42, who changed her legal name from Mimi Haleyi, said that Mr. Weinstein asked her for a massage at their first professional meeting, but that she rejected his advances at subsequent meetings. He eventually helped get her a job as a production assistant on the television show “Project Runway,” she said.
Then, on July 11, 2006, Ms. Haley accepted an invitation to visit Mr. Weinstein at his apartment in Lower Manhattan. She said he pushed her onto a bed, even as she protested, held her down and forced oral sex on her. “I’m being raped,” she recalled thinking.
The defense elicited testimony from Ms. Haley that she continued to see Mr. Weinstein after the alleged attack, having consensual sex with him two weeks later at a hotel. She also told her friends about her friendship with him, pitched him ideas for projects, and accepted tickets to movie premieres and for a flight to London.
Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers also asked why none of the six women reported the incidents to the police.
Prosecutors told jurors that the women feared Mr. Weinstein would ruin their careers if they reported the encounters to law enforcement. Prosecutors also called an expert on the psychology of sexual assault victims, Dr. Barbara Ziv, who said victims often do not report such crimes to the authorities and sometimes maintain relationships with their attackers.
Ms. Rotunno had said the prosecutors invented a world where women have no free will and are not responsible for their own decisions, suggesting Mr. Weinstein’s accusers now regretted having had consensual sex with him at the time when they stood to benefit.
But Joan Illuzzi, the lead prosecutor, countered that it was Mr. Weinstein who had created a world in which women with less than him, and more to lose, had no choice but to subjected to his unwanted advances and abuse, until now.
“He was the master of his universe, and the witnesses here were merely ants that he could step on without consequences,” Ms. Illuzzi said. “The fact they wanted to get into his universe was all he needed to turn around and say — they don’t get to complain when they are stepped on, spit on, demoralized, and yes, raped and abused by the defendant.”
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