UPDATE, 12:45 PM: There was no sexual assault or abuse from Harvey Weinstein to the three women at the heart of his just started rape retrial in New York, the defense said in their opening statement today.
Instead, attorney Arthur Aidala insisted these were mutual and consensual “friends with benefits” arrangements between Weinstein and accusers Jessica Mann, Miriam Haley and Kaja Sokola. He gets them auditions, he gets them jobs and in return they fool around with him,” the lawyer told the packed Manhattan courtroom on the first day of the retrial that could see the 72-year-old Weinstein behind bars for the rest of his life if found guilty
In that context and coming out of Weinstein seeing his 2020 sex crimes conviction overturned last year, Aidala, promised the jury of seven women and five men Wednesday that they would see “the whole movie” about Weinstein and his relationships with the trio of woman accusing him of forcing sex on them, Citing the Manhattan District Attorney’s office as just offering glimpses of what supposedly really occurred, Aidala said, “rhe relationships are long-term relationships,” describing the charged crimes as “minutes” in a span of years.
During that time, Aidala said, the three women accepted career help from Weinstein, basked in his fame and influence, introduced him to family members even after alleged assaults, and ultimately took money from totaling $4 million from an insurer to settle abuse claims.
A frequent presence on cable news for his client and others, Aidala pitched to jurors that for years after the alleged attacks, there was regular contact from the women with Weinstein. To that, he noted what he called “very friendly and very amicable” text and email correspondence between Weinstein and the women. Dismissing the DA’s office’s arguments, Aidala said that prosecutors are asking jurors to overlook the true, mutually exploitive nature of relationships between three ambitious young women — who he variously described as “smart, sophisticated” and “manipulative and conniving”— and a movie mogul at the peak of his powers and influence.
They used Weinstein, the lawyer said, to “cut the line” past aspiring actors who had invested years in training for a shot at paying roles, and they were disappointed to learn that Weinstein could only get them audiences with directors or casting directors, and couldn’t guarantee them work and fame.
Their willingness to come forward after years of silence in the wake of a 2017 New York times exposé on Weinstein — which sparked the #MeToo backlash against powerful men accused of abuse — is about making up for their frustrated career aspirations, Aidala said. “They want to be relevant, they want to be heroes of the movement,” he said. By doing media interviews or taking settlement money, or both, he said, they achieved a kind of lucrative stardom. “What they failed in the beginning at they achieved in the end,” he said.
Aidala did not address the prosecution’s contention that Weinstein’s first sexual encounter with Sokola took place when she was 16 years old, but he described her as “troubled.”
It was a starkly different account — sometimes delivered in ribald language as Aidala depicted a sex act — than the darker portrait painted by prosecutor Shannon Lucey in her opening statement Wednesday. Lucey said Weinstein was the manipulator of his victims: He “strung them along,” using “promises of career assistance,” “threats of career destruction,” and promises of movie roles “even when the parts weren’t there.”
“He simply did not take ‘no’ for an answer,” Lucey said. “If he was told, ‘no,’ he simply got what he wanted by force.”
Lucey and Aidala did agree on one point today.
“The defendant committed these acts when he was at the top of the entertainment industry,” Lucey said. But she said the abuse and the assaults arose from an imbalance of power between the women and Weinstein as they sought to navigate their fraught relationship with him and avoid incurring his wrath.
“He had all of the power,” Lucey said. “They had none.”
In remarks frequently interrupted by objections from Aidala — most overruled — Lucey showed jurors photographs of the three women projected on video flatscreens, and previewed testimony that is likely to be graphic at times, and reluctant, Lucey said, because none is anxious to tell their stories to “a roomful of strangers” and journalists.
“Their testimony will not be history reinvented,” Lucey said.
This afternoon the first prosecution witness, Stefan Sterns, was a former employee at Miramax and then The Weinstein Company who said he once met accuser Miriam Haley in 2006 when he was Weinstein’s personal assistant. Sterns’ time on the stand will likely continue Thursday as the judge aims to end the day around 1:30 pm PT/4:30 pm ET.
1ST UPDATE, 10:01 AM: Harvey Weinstein used his leverage as a dominant film producer and the career dreams he had the power to deliver on for aspiring newcomers to the industry, to trap young women into sexual encounters they never asked for and didn’t want, a Manhattan prosecutor said today in opening statements in the rape and sexual assault retrial of the once-powerful Pulp Fiction producer and Shakespeare in Love Oscar-winner.
“He used those dream opportunities as weapons,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Shannon Lucey told the seven-woman, five-man jury on Wednesday morning.
One of Weinstein’s targets was 16-year-old model, Kaja Sokola, newly arrived to New York from her native Poland. In her opening, Lucey identified Sokola — now a mother living in Manhattan — as the previously unnamed new accuser in a revived indictment of Weinstein that charges him with committing a first-degree criminal sexual act.
Lucey said that the criminal charge is for an assault on Sokola that occurred in 2006 at a Manhattan hotel — four years after she arrived in New York as a teen-aged Polish beauty pageant winner and new U.S. model agency signee. But the prosecutor also recounted an earlier, uncharged episode between Weinstein and Sokola in 2002 at an apartment in Manhattan that occurred days after she had stepped off a plane in New York for the first time in her life.
After opening prosecution statements lasting more than an hour, Judge Curtis Farber called a brief recess before Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, was elected to deliver his own opening statement.
PREVIOUSLY, 6:04 AM: Over five years after Harvey Weinstein’s previous New York City sex crimes trial saw the once powerful producer sentenced to 23 years behind bars, the much accused Weinstein’s retrial for rape and sexual assault gets underway this morning in a Manhattan courtroom.
Less than 24 hours after the jury was seated Tuesday, opening statements will be delivered today starting at 7 am PT/10 am ET to a panel of seven women and five men.
Like the Big Apple jury before it five years ago and a Los Angeles jury in 2022, the jury Wednesday will begin the process of hearing the arguments and evidence to decide the guilt or innocence of the Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love. If found guilty again, the ailing 72-year-old Weinstein, who saw his previous conviction tossed out in April 2024 over controversial prior bad acts testimony, will likely spend the rest of his life in a state prison.
After seeing their successful work in 2020 cast aside, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office are again painting Weinstein as a serial predator. As they have before, the prosecution will tell this jury that Weinstein for decades used his dominant position in Hollywood to attack and abuse women in the industry and then buy their silence with intimidation, money and NDAs.
Weinstein is facing three accusers in court this time.
Two are women he was previously convicted of subjecting to sexual violence, Jessica Mann and Miriam Haley, before those guilty verdicts — for rape and commission of a criminal sexual act, respectively — were overturned. An accusation from a third, unnamed woman is the basis of a new grand jury indictment that was handed down in September, for a single count of first-degree criminal sexual act. The third woman is expected to testify that Weinstein forced himself on her in a Manhattan hotel room in 2006.
Amidst accusations, allegations and dozens of lawsuits over the past eight years since his very public downfall, Weinstein has maintained that all of his sexual encounters were consensual. Those assertions by Weinstein include those with multiple accusers who had never met each other giving very similar graphic accounts, going back to the 1970s, of rapes and assaults in hotel rooms, in homes and during industry events.
RELATED: Harvey Weinstein “Cautiously Excited” After 2020 Rape Conviction Overturned
Whispered about, those stories surfaced in 2017 in a pair of Pulitzer Prize-winning exposés by the New York Times and New Yorker magazine. Opening a floodgate of misconduct, casting couch and elsewhere, the pieces on Weinstein gave rise to a movement with #MeToo as its hashtag and Weinstein as Exhibit A. More than anyone, Weinstein came to embody the figure of the powerful, seemingly untouchable male predator finally being called out by his victims in an overdue reckoning for all abusers of women.
Now Weinstein’s legal team, led by defense lawyer Arthur Aidala, have cast the overturning of the conviction as a step toward vindication. “We are hopeful that this time, the legal process will rise above noise and narrative, and allow Harvey Weinstein the fair trial he’s long been denied,” Weinstein representative Juda Engelmayer told Deadline on April 22. “He deserves the chance to clear his name and preserve a legacy that has been overshadowed by deeply flawed and misleading accusations.”
At the same time as this East Coast trial is beginning, Weinstein is appealing his 2022 conviction by an L.A. jury for raping and assaulting a woman, identified only as Jane Doe, in 2013.
The West Coast conviction has kept the Pulp Fiction producer incarcerated even after his prison sentence and conviction in New York was vacated. That court ruled 4-3 that the judge in the original trial, James Burke, had unfairly prejudiced the jury against the defendant by allowing three additional women to testify that Weinstein had assaulted them even though their accusations were not contained in the original indictment.
With now ex-Judge Burke not reappointed by Mayor Eric Adams’ office, the retrial will be overseen by Judge Curtis Farber. At the same time, the prosecution will have a new team leader, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Nicole Blumberg, chief of the office’s Intimate Partners and Sexual Violence Bureau.
In and out of hospitals the past five years, Weinstein returns to court in New York a gaunter and paler version of his old larger-than-life and loud self, having recently undergone treatment for cancer and emergency heart and lung surgery. It is unclear whether he will testify in his own defense, which he did not do in either of his previous criminal trials in New York and Los Angeles. Playing to the drama, lawyer Aidala has said he wouldn’t rule it out.
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On the other hand, Mann, who was an aspiring actress, and Haley, who worked as a television production assistant, are both expected to return to the stand in the retrial. That could mean a repeat of the graphic and emotionally grueling testimony that preceded Weinstein’s first conviction.
Judge Faber has said that he hopes the trial will be over “by the end of May.”
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