Wheelchair-Bound Harvey Weinstein Returns to Court After Illness, Jury Deliberates His Fate in Rape Trial
Harvey Weinstein returned to court and jurors resumed deliberating in his rape retrial Thursday, a day after the former movie tycoon reported chest pains while in the courthouse.
Weinstein, who’s 74 and has a history of heart trouble and other health woes, looked pale but alert as he was brought into court in the wheelchair he has used for years. He said he felt “good, fine.”
The ex-studio boss was in a courthouse holding area Wednesday when jurors, after a few hours of deliberating, sent a note asking to rehear some of accuser Jessica Mann’s testimony and to review a lengthy prosecution timeline of emails and other evidence.
After defense lawyers, prosecutors and Judge Curtis Farber convened in court to decide how to respond, Weinstein attorney Marc Agnifilo said court officers had told him Weinstein was experiencing chest pains.
Weinstein wasn’t brought into court at that point, and Farber ultimately sent jurors home Wednesday a bit earlier than planned, telling them there were “unforeseen reasons” for the early dismissal.
Jurors got the requested information Thursday, revisiting testimony that Agnifilo had highlighted in his closing argument: a moment when Mann said she was “spacing out” as a defense lawyer asked why she didn’t want a friend to know that anything sexual had happened between her and Weinstein.
The defense was trying to suggest that she was worried about her reputation, not an alleged rape that Weinstein says never happened.
Jurors returned to their closed-door discussions. Over the ensuing hours, the jury asked to rehear Mann’s testimony about the alleged rape and the lead-up to it, and to go over the judge’s instructions on reasonable doubt.
That’s the legal bar that evidence must clear to justify a conviction.
Jurors ultimately went home for the night without reaching a verdict. Deliberations are to resume Friday.
Mann, 40, has testified that she willingly had some sexual interludes with the then-married producer, but that he subjected her to unwanted sex in a Manhattan hotel room in March 2013 after she repeatedly said no.
Weinstein’s lawyers maintain that the encounter was consensual.
They have emphasized that Mann subsequently continued seeing Weinstein and expressing warmth toward him. Mann has said she was mired in complicated feelings about him, herself and what had happened.
Her viewpoint changed in 2017, when a series of sexual misconduct allegations against the Oscar-winning Weinstein propelled the #MeToo campaign to hold people — especially powerful men — accountable for sexual misbehavior.
Weinstein has said he “acted wrongly” but never assaulted anyone.
Some of those accusations generated criminal convictions against Weinstein in New York and California.
An appeals court overturned his 2020 New York conviction on charges that involved Mann and another accuser. At a retrial last year, jurors failed to reach a verdict on Mann’s portion of the case, leading to this retrial. Weinstein is charged with one count of rape in the third degree.
The current jury heard nearly three weeks of testimony, five days of it from Mann. Weinstein did not testify.
The Associated Press generally does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted. Mann, however, has agreed to be named.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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