Harvey Weinstein found guilty in second sex crime case: What was the matter?

Los Angeles: Harvey Weinstein, once a film colossus who wielded immense power in Hollywood, was found guilty Monday of raping and sexually assaulting an actress in 2013, but jurors found him not guilty of one charge and could not decide on three other counts.

The verdict, delivered by jurors in Los Angeles, was the second sex crimes conviction for Weinstein, 70, who was found guilty nearly three years ago of sexual assault and rape in New York. It served as a backstop for keeping Weinstein in prison, given that New York’s highest court has agreed to review his conviction there.

A string of accusations in 2017 against the former movie producer propelled the #MeToo movement into a global phenomenon, holding powerful men across entertainment and government accountable for decades of sexual misconduct, and inciting a worldwide uprising by women sharing their own experiences of sexual harassment and assault.

Because of some of the complicated dynamics of the verdict and the state’s sentencing laws, Weinstein faces the possibility of 18 to 24 years behind bars in California — not a maximum of life in prison. He would serve that time after completing his sentence in New York, where he still has 21 years left in prison unless his appeal is successful.

Weinstein faced seven counts in Los Angeles — two of rape and five of sexual assault — stemming from incidents involving four women from 2004 to 2013. Jurors deliberated for more than nine days, and the length of their discussions reflected the difficulty they had in reaching unanimity on some charges. They agreed that Weinstein was guilty of three counts — rape, forcible oral sex and sexual penetration — involving an Italian actress who testified that he attacked her in a hotel room in 2013.

They also acquitted Weinstein of one count of sexual battery involving a massage therapist.

But the jurors could not decide on two counts related to accusations made by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and the wife of Governor Gavin Newsom of California, nor could they agree on one count stemming from Lauren Young, a model and screenwriter who said she was assaulted by Weinstein in his hotel room.

The courtroom, mostly packed with lawyers and reporters, was silent as the clerk read the complicated verdict. At one point, a cellphone went off, and Weinstein shot a look across the gallery, searching for the source. He slumped a bit in his chair upon hearing the guilty verdicts on the first three counts, and he showed no visible reaction on the other four.

Prosecutors will now have to decide whether to retry the three counts on which the jury was deadlocked. Gloria Allred, the lawyer for Young, said after the verdict that her client was “100 per cent committed to testifying again if she was asked to do so.”

Siebel Newsom said after the verdict that she was confident that Weinstein would never be released.

“He will spend the rest of his life behind bars where he belongs,” she said in a statement. “Harvey Weinstein is a serial predator and what he did was rape.”

The mixed verdict followed weeks of tearful, often graphic testimony by the four accusers, and by four other women who were allowed under state law to testify about similar experiences they said they had with Weinstein in order to establish a pattern of behaviour. A fifth accuser dropped out of the case.

Prosecutors and defence lawyers made their closing arguments more than two weeks ago. As days passed without a verdict, frustrations grew behind the scenes among those who had hoped Weinstein would be convicted in short order. Throughout the deliberations, the jurors asked a question and for testimony to be read back, but the specifics of their queries were withheld by Judge Lisa B Lench of Los Angeles Superior Court in a rare move to shield courtroom information from the public.

In testimony, women described conduct that for many has become familiar in the five years since The New York Times reported accusations of Weinstein’s behaviour.

Prosecutors told jurors that Weinstein was a serial predator with a finely tuned strategy for preying on vulnerable women. During her closing argument, Marlene Martinez, a deputy district attorney, showed an image of a wolf pouncing and a menacing metal trap.

“There is no question that Harvey Weinstein was a predator,” she said. “And, like all predators, he had a method.”

Weinstein, a “titan” of the film industry, would first show interest in a younger woman’s career, she said. Then he would arrange to meet with the woman under the guise of helping her professionally. Prosecutors said Weinstein would typically insist that the woman meet in his suite, where he would isolate and assault her.

“Confined within those walls, victims were not able to run from his hulking mass,” she said.

Lawyers for Weinstein sought to portray his accusers as opportunists who had consensual sex with the film producer as a means of trying to get ahead in Hollywood; only later, embarrassed by the encounters in light of the seismic shift in the industry, did they say they had been harmed, the lawyers said.

In his closing argument for the defence, one lawyer, Alan Jackson, said the case came down to whether the jurors trusted the women.

“‘Take my word for it’ — five words that sum up the entirety of the prosecution’s case,” Jackson said. “Everything else was smoke and mirrors.”

He acknowledged the accusers’ emotional distress as real, but said it was the result of hindsight, not the reality of their experience with the transactional nature of sex in Hollywood.

“I don’t know how to say it more gentle than this, but fury does not make fact,” he said. “Tears do not make truth.”

It signified something of a departure from the defence’s tenor earlier in the trial. In cross-examinations, the lawyers had aggressively questioned the women about discrepancies in their accounts.

Mark Werksman, another of Weinstein’s lawyers, didn’t hesitate to use blunt, even derogatory, language in describing the accusers.

At one point, he said Siebel Newsom was “just another bimbo who slept with Harvey Weinstein to get ahead,” eliciting gasps.

Siebel Newsom said she was raped by Weinstein in 2005 in his Beverly Hills hotel room after meeting up with him to discuss her career. She said she had tried to ignore the incident for years as “a way of putting away my sadness, my fear, my trauma, so I could move forward with my life.”

Her two days of testimony drew the largest crowds of the monthslong trial at the downtown Los Angeles courthouse. Newsom was in the building during his wife’s appearance but not in the courtroom.

In her statement after the verdict, Siebel Newsom criticised the defence lawyers for their approach to the case.

“Throughout the trial, Weinstein’s lawyers used sexism, misogyny and bullying tactics to intimidate, demean and ridicule us survivors,” she said. “This trial was a stark reminder that we as a society have work to do. To all survivors out there — I see you, I hear you, and I stand with you.”

Prosecutors and Weinstein’s defence team walked briskly out of the courtroom past reporters. Paul Thompson, a deputy district attorney, declined to comment because the case was still open; lawyers are scheduled to return Tuesday for more arguments related to special findings on some of the counts.

George Gascón, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, in a statement praised the women who testified for their “extraordinary bravery” and said that he hoped the partial verdicts would “bring at least some measure of justice to the victims.”

Still, he expressed some disappointment at the outcome. “They deserve better than what the system has given them,” he said of the women.

#MeToo supporters were hoping for another conviction against Weinstein, in part to give greater confidence to women who, they say, have long been silenced by a power structure that dismisses their claims. While the accusations against Weinstein accelerated its growth, the #MeToo movement was initially founded by Tarana Burke in 2006 to seek healing for Black women who had suffered sexual abuse.

Lawyers who have represented other sexual abuse survivors said that although the jury had not reached a decision on three of the seven counts, any guilty verdict against Weinstein was significant.

“Hung juries can be complex,” said Michelle Simpson Tuegel, an attorney who has represented victims of sexual abuse. The guilty verdict, she added, “shows that the defence’s old-fashioned strategy of blaming and shaming the victims can backfire in the post #MeToo era.”

Supporters said before the trial that the future of the movement did not hinge on any single legal fight. While the results of closely watched celebrity trials — such as the legal duel between actors Amber Heard and Johnny Depp that riveted the internet this spring — might seem like barometers, supporters point to deeper structural changes that #MeToo has inspired.

“#MeToo as a movement and an inspiration really has never been about one single individual, no matter how powerful,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Centre. “This movement doesn’t begin and end with him.”

Lauren Herstik, Jill Cowan and Livia Albeck-Ripka, c.2022 The New York Times Company

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