Harvey Weinstein found guilty of rape and sexual assault in Los Angeles trial | Harvey Weinstein

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A Los Angeles jury has found Harvey Weinstein guilty of rape and sexual assault, five years after dozens of women spoke out against the Hollywood producer and prompted the #MeToo movement.

After more than nine days of deliberations, the jury convicted Weinstein on three counts of rape and sexual assault against one woman, a European model who testified anonymously as “Jane Doe 1,” while remaining divided on three other counts of rape and sexual assault by two co-defendants. Others, including Jennifer Seibel Newsom, wife of the California governor.

The ruling led to the fall of the former Hollywood stockbroker in the city where he once worked as “king”. Weinstein, 70, who is already serving a 23-year prison sentence after a criminal conviction in New York in 2020, now faces additional years in prison.

This verdict is the second time Weinstein has been convicted of sexual offenses. The jury in Weinstein’s criminal trial in New York reached a similarly mixed verdict, convicting the former producer of third-degree rape and sexual assault, but acquitting him of predatory sexual assault and first-degree rape.

During the Los Angeles trial, the jury heard weeks of graphic and emotional testimony from eight women who testified Weinstein raped or sexually assaulted them in hotels around the world, many of them during what they thought would be networking meetings about opportunities in the film industry. . Weinstein only faced criminal charges in the case of the alleged assaults that occurred in California.

Some of the more emotional testimony at the trial came from Jennifer Seibel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker who is now married to California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Sibel Newsom testified Weinstein assaulted and raped her during what she believed was a business meeting at a hotel in 2005, when she was a young actress and producer still trying to find her way in the industry. Sibel Newsom wept repeatedly on the stand, calling the alleged attack her “worst nightmare,” and faced vicious cross-examination from Weinstein’s attorneys.

The prosecution painted Weinstein as a “predator” who used a pattern of manipulation and coercion to get his prey. “For this predator, the hotels were his trap,” Marilyn Martinez, the attorney on the case, said during closing arguments. She pointed to patterns in testimonies of women who described Weinstein approaching and attacking them in similar ways.

Martinez said Weinstein’s accusers were pursuing their Hollywood dreams, but “at the end of that dream was the monster at the end of that table.”

Weinstein, who chose not to testify, appeared shrunken and pale as he sat in court throughout the trial. The 70-year-old pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyers mounted an aggressive defense, attacking his accusers’ credibility and calling Siebel Newsom a “bimbo.”

Jennifer Seibel Newsom applauds her husband, Governor Gavin Newsom, after his statewide inaugural address in Sacramento, Calif., in March 2022. Photo: Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

Legal observers said the blatant misogyny in Weinstein’s defense was startling, and seemed like a throwback to 1980s tactics.

Weinstein’s defense argued that two of the defendants had fabricated testimony, and that the others had engaged in consensual sex, which they were attempting to retroactively classify as assault. Weinstein’s team also detailed graphic details including sounds made by Siebel Newsom during her alleged attack, as well as the accuracy of another accuser’s description of Weinstein’s genitalia.

In his closing arguments, defense attorney Alan Jackson warned the jury not to be swayed by the impact of the #MeToo movement, and said the testimony of eight different women did not provide evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that he had committed any crime.

“The truth is constant. It’s not a feeling. It’s not a whim. The law is not captive to the quicksand of grassroots movement.”

Jackson called Siebel Newsom’s decision to speak out against Weinstein in 2017 as other women began speaking out, a choice spurred by public perception: “I turned on him in a second, not because he was right, but because he was fashionable,” Jackson said.

The Weinstein defense team’s personal attacks on Siebel Newsom, including claims that she “must be lying, must do it for some personal gain” are the same tropes “that are used against all kinds of people we support,” said Jennifer Mondino, principal Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which provides assistance to people who have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, “truck drivers, farm workers, and domestic workers.”

“These are some of the reasons why survivors are reluctant to come forward…the fear that people will bring up these same stereotypes about them,” Mondino said.

Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor who specializes in criminal law, said the general public tends to underestimate the importance of juries, how well the evidence is weighed, and the standard of reasonable doubt for each count in a large case.

If jurors know they will convict a defendant on some counts, “and have a vague sense of the length of the sentence,” Weisberg said, they may also feel more comfortable acquitting the defendant on other counts that they are less likely to do. Sure, “because it’s not all or nothing.”

Weinstein originally faced 11 counts of rape and assault out of a total of five defendants, but prosecutors said midway through the trial that the fifth accuser would not testify, and four charges related to her were dropped.

As a New York court agreed to hear an appeal of Weinstein’s conviction, some of the dozens of women who spoke out against him worried that, like Bill Cosby, he might end up being paroled.

“If he was out now, he would still be doing what he was doing before,” said Don Dunning, 43, who testified at Weinstein’s trial in New York, ahead of the sentencing in Los Angeles. “It even worries me that this is a possibility.”

For the women who testified in the New York trial, “it honestly didn’t matter” what he believed the jury chose to convict, which they didn’t, Dunning said.

She said she expected the reaction of the women who testified in Los Angeles would be the same. She said, “It doesn’t matter what the charges are.” “We just want him to stay in jail so he can’t do that to anyone else.”

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