(NEW YORK) — Harvey Weinstein has been convicted on one count of engaging in criminal sex but acquitted on the second in his sex crimes retrial in New York.
The jury was unable to reach a verdict on the rape count.
The verdict comes after some apparent discord in the jury room during deliberations.
On Monday, the jury foreperson wrote in a note to Judge Curtis Farber, “I need to talk to you about a situation that isn’t very good.” The foreperson was called into the judge’s chambers, where he said some jurors were “attacking, talking together, fight together” — adding, “I don’t like it” — according to a transcript of the closed encounter.
The foreperson said jurors were discussing Harvey Weinstein’s past.
When the judge summoned the entire jury that day, he reminded them to discuss only the evidence presented at trial and to be cordial.
Prosecutors said Weinstein “preyed on three women” as “he held unfettered power for over 30 years” in Hollywood, while the defense countered the producer did not coerce the women and claimed they were using him for his connections.
Weinstein, 73, pleaded not guilty and has said his sexual encounters were consensual. He did not testify during the trial, where he is being retried for sexually assaulting two women, Mimi Haley and Jessica Mann, after an earlier conviction was overturned on appeal. He is also charged with sexually assaulting a third woman, Kaja Sokola, who was not part of the first trial. All three women have publicly come forward and testified during the trial.
“Harvey Weinstein had enormous control over those working in television and film. He decided who was in and who was out,” the prosecutor, Shannon Lucey, told the jury of seven women and five men at the start of the trial. “He held the golden ticket. The chance to make it or not.”
Lucey claimed that “no” was “not a word the defendant was used to hearing.”
Weinstein’s defense attorney, Arthur Aidala, agreed with prosecutors that Weinstein was a powerful man in the television and film industries, but he told the jury Weinstein did not coerce the women he’s accused of assaulting. Instead, Aidala claimed Weinstein engaged in “mutually beneficial relationships” that the attorney said have been going on in Hollywood for a hundred years.
“They’re fooling around with him consensually,” Aidala claimed. “The casting couch was not a crime scene.”
In detailing the alleged sexual assaults, Lucey claimed that when Haley went to Weinstein’s Crosby Street apartment in July 2006 to discuss a production role on “Project Runway,” he allegedly “held her down” and subjected her to forcible sexual conduct.
Sokola was 16 when she first met Weinstein in 2002 at a restaurant in the West Village shortly after signing a modeling contract to come to New York from Poland. Several years later, in 2006, Weinstein cast Sokola as an extra in “The Nanny Diaries.” After a lunch at a Manhattan hotel that year, Weinstein allegedly “pressed on her shoulders with enough force to get her down on the bed” and forced oral sex on the 19-year-old as she said, “Please do not do this,” Lucey claimed.
Lucey also claimed Weinstein allegedly forced Sokola to touch his genitals in a Manhattan apartment when she was 16. Weinstein is not charged in that alleged 2002 incident in the indictment, as it is outside the statute of limitations. But the judge has allowed Sokola to testify about it during the trial, along with a second alleged incident involving Weinstein she says occurred in 2004. Sokola previously filed a lawsuit in New York under the Child Victims Act over the alleged 2002 incident, which prosecutors said has since been settled.
In 2013, Weinstein allegedly subjected Mann to sex without her consent at a hotel, according to Lucey. Mann testified that Weinstein raped her after finding out she had a serious boyfriend who was an actor. Lucey claimed Mann had also engaged in sexual encounters with Weinstein that were not coerced out of fear of his power in the industry.
The new trial comes after the New York Court of Appeals overturned Weinstein’s initial 2020 conviction last year, finding the trial judge “erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes.”
Weinstein has also appealed his conviction in December 2022 on sex offenses in Los Angeles. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison there.
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