New York – Opening statements began Wednesday in Harvey Weinstein The new rape trial, five years after his original judgment #Metoo delivered an abrasing calculation for one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures.
Emphasizing the influence of the film industry of the former head of study in the film industry, prosecutor Shannon Lucey said Weinstein used “dream opportunities as weapons” to take advantage of the three accusers in the case. He is accused of raping one and forcing oral sex in the other two.
“The defendant wanted his bodies, and the more they resisted, the more forceful he got,” Lucey said.
The case is being withdrawn because an appeals court He showed the historical conviction 2020.
The new trial is happening in the same Manhattan court that the First judgmentAnd two accusers who will testify return.
Weinstein’s trial It is developing at a different cultural moment from the first, which occurred during the apogee of the #Metoo Movement. Together with the charges that are retracted, he faces an additional accusation of a woman who was not involved in the first case.
He The jury has seven women And five men, unlike the panel of seven men and five women who condemned him in 2020, and there is a different judge.
The #MeToo movement, which exploded in 2017 with accusations against Weinstein, has also evolved and decreased.
At the beginning of Weinstein’s first trial, the “rapist” songs could be heard from the protesters outside.
The television trucks aligned in the street, and the journalists queue for hours to get a seat in the courtroom. His lawyers denounced the “carnival atmosphere” and fought without success for the trial to move from Manhattan.
This time, for five days of jury selection, there was nothing like that.
Those realities, together with the ruling of the Court of Appeals of New York, last year, annuling his 2020 sentence and his 23 -year prison sentence, because the judge allowed testimony about the accusations that Weinstein was not accused, they are shaping everything, from the legal trial strategy to the atmosphere in court.
Weinstein, 73, is being withdrawn by a criminal sex office for allegedly performing oral sex in a films and television production assistant, Miriam Haley, in 2006 and a third degree rape charge for allegedly assaulting an aspiring actor, Jessica Mann, in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.
Weinstein also faces a position of criminal sex to allegedly force oral sex in a different woman in a Manhattan hotel in 2006. Prosecutors said the woman, who has not been publicly appointed, appeared days before her first judgment, but was not part of that case. They said they reviewed their accusations when their conviction was expelled.
Associated Press generally does not identify people who allege sexual assault unless they consent to be named, as Haley and Mann have done.
Weinstein declared himself innocent and denies sexually raping or assaulting anyone. His acquitted for the two most serious positions in his 2020 trial, predatory sexual assault and rape in the first degree, still remain.
Lindsay Goldbrum, lawyer of the unidentified accuser, said that Weinstein’s new trial marks a “fundamental moment in the struggle for responsibility in cases of sexual abuse” and a “signal for other survivors that the system is updating, and that it is worth speaking even when the probabilities seem insuromontable.”
This time, the Manhattan District Prosecutor’s Office is processing Weinstein through its division of special victims, which specializes in such cases, after homicide veterans directed version 2020. At the same time, Weinstein has added several lawyers to their defense team, including Jennifer Bonjean, who is involved in appealing his condemnation for rape for 2022 in Los Angeles. She helped Bill Cosby Obtain your condemnation revoked and defended to R. Kelly in her case of sexual crimes.
“This trial is not #Metoo. It will be the facts of what happened,” Weinstein’s main lawyer, Arthur Aidala, recently said. “And that is a big problem. And that is the way it is supposed to be.”
But there has already been talk of #Metoo. A prosecutor asked the possible jurors if they had heard of the movement. The majority said they had done it, but that would not affect them in any way.
Others went further.
A woman said that “it has not been done enough” as a result of #Metoo. A man explained that he had negative feelings about it because his high school classmates had been falsely accused of sexual assault.
Another man said he saw #MeToo like other social movements: “He is a pendulum. He swings in one way, then to the other way, and then sits.”
None of them are in the jury.
