Harvey Weinstein: Key moments from the Los Angeles trial of the disgraced film producer | Ents & Arts News

Harvey Weinstein had been charged with raping and sexually assaulting two women and committing sexual assault against two others.

After a month of testimony from 44 witnesses in Los Angeles, a jury found Weinstein guilty of one count of rape.

He was found not guilty of forcible sexual assault of another woman.

The jury was also unable to rule on allegations related to two other women.

Currently two years into a 23-year sentence for prior rape and sexual assault convictions in New York, Weinstein was held in prison throughout his final trial.

The Los Angeles trial was widely seen as symbolic – but it took on greater significance in light of the fact that the producer was was granted permission to appeal his convictions in New York.

The 70-year-old was charged with crimes against four of the witnesses who testified.

Three of the women – a model, a model/actress and a massage therapist – testified anonymously.

Filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, has waived her right to anonymity.

The jury was unable to reach verdicts on the charges relating to Newsom.

Four other women who are not implicated in the charges also told the court that Weinstein sexually assaulted them.

Here are the key moments of the trial:

Defense

Weinstein’s attorney told the trial that the prosecution’s case hinged entirely on asking them to trust women whose evidence showed them to be untrustworthy.

In his closing arguments, Alan Jackson said, “‘Take my word for it.’ Five words that sum up the entire prosecution case.”

Everything else presented by prosecutors “was smoke and mirrors,” he argued.

Mr Jackson urged jurors to look beyond the drama and emotion of the four women’s testimony and focus on the factual evidence.

He said jurors had to “believe us because we’re crazy, believe us because we cried”, adding: “Well, fury doesn’t make reality. And tears don’t make truth.”

Mr Jackson said the stories of two women Weinstein allegedly sexually assaulted on consecutive days in 2013 “just never happened”.

The defense attorney also said the alleged rape and assault of the other two women in 2005 and 2010 were “100% consensual” encounters the women engaged in for the sake of career advancement that they later became “desperate to relabel” as nonconsensual. .

“These were women Harvey had transactional relationships with and transactional sex with,” he said.

Mr Jackson argued that women were willing to trade sex for favors or status when the incidents occurred in 2005 and 2010, but after the #Me too explosion around Weinstein with articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker in 2017, they regretted.

“They played the game. They hate it now, unequivocally,” he said. “But what about then? What about before the start of the 2017 dog pile on Mr. Weinstein?”

He stressed the importance of the judge’s instruction that if jurors found something material a witness had said to be untrue, they should consider disbelieving everything the witness said.

The accusation

Prosecutors, closing their case, called Weinstein a “predator” and a “degenerate rapist.”

Assistant District Attorney Marlene Martinez pointed to similarities between her accusers’ testimony.

“They’re all describing the same behavior by the same man,” she said.

After arranging to meet a woman at a hotel, he would find a way to take them to his suite where he would then go from “lovely and complementary to aggressive and demanding”.

Ms Martinez said: “For this predator, hotels were his trap.

“Confined within these walls, the victims could not escape its imposing mass.

“People couldn’t hear their screams, they couldn’t see them cowering.”

She urged jurors to complete Weinstein’s disgrace by convicting him in California.

She said: “It is time for the defendant’s reign of terror to end.

“It is time for the kingmaker to be brought to justice.”

“I was a bit hysterical through the tears”

The first of Weinstein’s accusers, a model and actress who was in Los Angeles for a film festival when she was raped by the producer in 2013, told the court he knocked on her bedroom door. hotel and that she had let him in.

She said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on his hotel bed. “I was a little hysterical through the tears,” she said. “I kept saying ‘no, no, no’.”

She said she physically feared Weinstein, who weighed her 100 pounds or more, and considered running, hitting or biting him.

She said the moment Weinstein took her into the bathroom to rape her, she stopped resisting physically, although she still objected verbally. “I froze, like my body wasn’t listening.”

He was found guilty of three counts, including rape.

A woman testifies for the second time

Only one woman who testified at the New York trial testified in Los Angeles. The model, who aspired to be a screenwriter, had set up a meeting with Weinstein about a screenplay she was working on in 2013, the court heard.

She described Weinstein as a “freak” and said he led her into a bathroom, quickly took off her suit and was briefly in the shower, then came out and stopped her from leaving.

“I was disgusted,” she said. “I had never seen a big guy like that naked.”

She said she leaned against a sink and turned away from him. He then unzipped her dress and groped it with one hand while he masturbated with the other, the court heard.

The jury did not rule on this count.

Masseuse tells court ‘I was in shock’

A massage therapist has accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in 2010, when she was 28, after hiring her to come to his hotel room for treatment.

When she was in the bathroom washing her hands after the massage, she said Weinstein came in, blocked the door and started masturbating in front of her.

She began to cry, telling the court, “I was terrified. Weinstein blocked the door and pushed her against a wall and touched her breasts before finishing, the court heard.

“I was in shock. I felt frozen, I felt paralyzed,” she said.

The jury found Weinstein not guilty of sexual assault.

The filmmaker cries while recounting an alleged rape

In moving testimony, Ms Siebel Newsom, 48, told the court she was 31 when she was allegedly attacked by Weinstein at what she believed was a business meeting to try to build her career by 2005.

Spending two and a half hours on the witness stand, she was in tears when she told the court that she unexpectedly found herself alone with the Hollywood mogul in a hotel suite.

When asked to describe her feelings after Weinstein allegedly came out of the bathroom in a bathrobe and started groping her while he masturbated, she said: “Horror! Horror! I’m shaking. I’m like a rock, I’m frigid. It’s my worst nightmare.”

Ms Siebel Newsom said she told Weinstein ‘that’s not why I came here’ as she physically tried to back away.

The jury did not return a verdict on those counts.