Jurors weighing the fate of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein said Wednesday that they had unanimously found him guilty of sexually assaulting one woman and not guilty of assaulting another more than a decade ago.
But the jurors at Weinstein's retrial told state Judge Curtis Farber in New York that they were unable to reach a verdict on allegations that he assaulted a third woman, and Farber sent them home for the day and asked them to resume deliberating on Thursday.
Weinstein, 73, had denied all the charges, and his lawyers insisted the sexual encounters with his three accusers were “transactional” and “consensual.”
But the jury came to a different conclusion after five days of deliberations, during which the foreman told the judge several times that jurors were having a hard time reaching a verdict and that several members had been clashing.
Before the partial verdict was announced, the foreman told the court he’d been threatened by another member of the panel who told him, “You know me; you going to see me outside.”
“I feel afraid inside there,” the juror told Farber, according to a transcript of the conversation supplied by the state courts. “I can’t be inside there.”
Weinstein defense attorney Arthur Aidala immediately objected.
“You have a grown man who has now said that people have told him in the jury room they’ll meet him outside,” Aidala said. “He said it twice.”
Farber dismissed that as “schoolyard nonsense.”
“He is a big guy,” the judge said. “He’s not particularly scared. He’s basically saying, ‘I am not changing my mind.’ He is not being intimidated to change his mind. He is standing his ground, which could be in your favor, of the prosecution’s favor.”
Weinstein then asked to address the judge and made a last-minute plea, saying, "This is not right for me, the person who is on trial here."
"Lawyers can fight all they want," Weinstein said, seated in his wheelchair. "This is my life on the line. It’s not fair. It’s that simple. It’s just not fair."
Farber agreed that it "was not a typical deliberation" but said that "it does happen" and that the result of the deliberations in the third case could wind up being in Weinstein's favor.
"It could be in my favor, but it’s not fair," Weinstein replied. "That’s the problem with this. ... This is over. "
Minutes later, the jurors returned to the courtroom and rendered a partial verdict.
Weinstein put his hands to his head after he was found guilty of criminal sexual act for the 2006 attack on former “Project Runway” production assistant Miriam Haley.
But he was found not guilty of a second charge of criminal sexual act stemming from allegations brought by former Polish runway model Kaja Sokola, who told the court he assaulted her, too, in 2006.
The jury deadlocked on a third-degree rape charge that accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting former actor Jessica Mann.
Haley’s lawyer Gloria Allred said outside the Manhattan courthouse after the partial verdict that the #MeToo movement is not dead.
“The real hero of this case is Mimi Haley, because he was convicted not once, but twice, based on her testimony,” Allred said.
Haley said that the verdict left her feeling hopeful and that she hopes others will continue to speak out against their abusers.
“To those predators who still believe they can exploit abuse and walk away unscathed: Your time is running out. The world is changing, and you will not outrun the consequences of your actions forever,” Haley said.
Sokola said she was happy with the verdict, even though the jury did not convict Weinstein of assaulting her.
“It’s a big win for everyone,” she said. “For myself, it’s closing of a chapter that caused me a lot of pain throughout my life.”
Mann said in a statement, "I would never lie about rape or use something so traumatic to hurt someone."
“I didn’t speak up to ruin his life," Mann said of Weinstein. "He did that. I spoke because mine matters.”
Haley and Mann testified at Weinstein’s first trial in 2020. Sokola's charge was new to the retrial.
Weinstein spokesman, Juda Engelmayer, said "we consider this a little bit of a victory" because the producer wasn't convicted for assaulting Sokola.
"He’s feeling, you know, not good about being convicted for Miriam, but relieved that he wasn’t convicted on Kaja and hopeful on the Jessica part," Engelmayer said of Weinstein during a press conference.
Weinstein found himself on trial again after the state Court of Appeals last year overturned his landmark 2020 conviction for sexually abusing young women, a trial that defined the #MeToo movement and helped turn Weinstein, the Oscar-winning former chief of Miramax, into a pariah. The appeals court found that the judge in that trial had improperly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case.
“If this person wasn’t Harvey Weinstein, would we even be here?” Aidala, his attorney, asked during his closing argument, in which he accused the women of being grifters.
Prosecutors, however, said Weinstein preyed on young women trying to make it in Hollywood, sometimes repeatedly, and threatened to wreck their careers if they talked.
“He never had any interest in their careers,” Assistant District Attorney Nicole Blumberg told the jury. “He had an interest in their bodies. And he was going to have their bodies and touch their bodies whether they had wanted him to or not."
Just as in 2020, Weinstein did not testify at his retrial. But he said in an interview with a reporter for WNYW-TV of New York after the jury began deliberations that he acted "immorally" and regretted having hurt his wife and family but that he never did anything "illegal."
"I put so many friends through this and hurt people ... that were close to me, by the way, by actions that were stupid," he said. "But never illegal, never criminal, never anything."
Much of the evidence that resulted in Weinstein’s being convicted five years ago of the third-degree rape of one woman and a first-degree criminal sex act against another woman was reintroduced at his retrial.
Just as before, Weinstein pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape based on complaints by Haley and Mann. But this time, he also pleaded not guilty to an additional charge of first-degree criminal sexual act in the alleged sexual assault of Sokola.
Sokola told the court that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her at a Manhattan hotel in 2006, when she was 19 years old. But the alleged abuse began in 2002, when she was 16 and Weinstein forced her to masturbate him, she said.
“Her first sexual experience was the defendant forcing himself on her,” Blumberg said.
During his three-hour closing, Aidala tried to poke holes in the testimony of the three accusers. He suggested prosecutors coached them to describe the sexual encounters, which he likened to “naked twister,” in a sinister light.
“They did it all to get the original sinner, the poster boy of the #MeToo movement,” Aidala said.
The #MeToo hashtag took off in 2017 after The New York Times and The New Yorker detailed allegations of sexual misconduct against Weinstein that went back decades. It helped inspire a reckoning in Hollywood and beyond around sexual harassment.
Weinstein, Aidala said, made for an easy target. “He’s a fat dude — sorry, Harvey,” he said while Weinstein looked on.
“It’s not really a casting couch I thought it was,” Aidala added. “It’s different now. I know it sounds crazy, but he’s the one being used.”
Blumberg painted a far different picture during the prosecution's closing remarks.
“I want to remind you why we are here,” she said. “Because he raped three people.”
Sokola and Haley both claimed that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on them in separate incidents in 2006. Mann told the court he raped her in 2013.
Weinstein, Blumberg said, “had tremendous control over Hollywood. He spoke, people listened. He decided who was in and who was out.”
“Remember, it’s not the person sitting here today in a wheelchair but this man, in Hollywood, who had the power and was in control,” Blumberg said.
Regardless of the verdict, Weinstein will most likely be returned to California, where he has to serve a 16-year sentence for a 2022 rape conviction. His lawyers filed an appeal of that conviction last year that is still in process.
During his latest trial, Weinstein has been allowed to stay at Bellevue Hospital, where he was being treated for a host of serious health issues.
In October, two sources told NBC News that Weinstein had been diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia, an uncommon form of bone marrow cancer.
Weinstein was a Hollywood titan in the 1990s and the 2000s, when he and his brother, Bob, ran Miramax, the distributor of critically acclaimed independent movies like “Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” “The Crying Game,” “Pulp Fiction” and “Clerks” and box office successes like “Chicago” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
In 1999, Weinstein won a best picture Oscar as one of the producers of “Shakespeare in Love.” And in the early 2010s, his second distribution label, The Weinstein Company, won back-to-back best picture Oscars for “The King’s Speech” and “The Artist.”
But as Weinstein collected accolades, he was dogged by rumors that he preyed on his leading ladies and other women in the industry. By the time he was arrested, more than 80 women had accused him of sexual assault or harassment going back decades.
Just as he did at his trials, Weinstein doggedly denied the claims and insisted the encounters were consensual.
