LOS ANGELES — A Los Angeles jury on Monday found Harvey Weinstein guilty of raping a woman, delivering a verdict that further condemns the disgraced movie titan whose treatment of women helped spur the #MeToo movement.
The decision all but assures that Weinstein, who is 70, in poor health and currently serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York for other rapes, will spend the rest of his life behind bars. He is scheduled to be sentenced in the Los Angeles case early next year, but must complete his current prison sentence before being transferred to California.
Following a bitter trial that stretched over a month, jurors deliberated for more than nine days before returning to convict Weinstein of a count each of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, and sexual penetration by a foreign object. The charges stemmed from allegations made by a woman who came forward to report Weinstein for attacking her in a Beverly Hills hotel room. The jury either acquitted Weinstein or could not reach a verdict on charges based on allegations of three other women who also accused him of sexual assaulting them in hotel rooms between 2004 and 2013.
Weinstein’s legal troubles in L.A. began on the eve of his Manhattan trial in January 2020, when prosecutors here brought an initial set of charges against him based on the allegations of two women. More charges would follow.
It was one of those first accusers, an Italian model identified in court as Jane Doe 1, on whose allegations the jury convicted Weinstein. She claimed Weinstein barged into her room at the Beverly Hills hotel she was staying in while attending a film festival to brutally assault her. She filed a report with Los Angeles police in October 2017, not long after articles in The New York Times and The New Yorker detailed sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein that helped spark the #MeToo movement and ended the career of one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures.
The second woman, Lauren Young, accused Weinstein of luring her to a hotel suite with an offer to discuss a screenplay she’d written and then groping her in a bathroom while he masturbated. Young first detailed her alleged assault during the New York trial, where she was among several women who testified about so-called “prior bad acts” by Weinstein that were not part of the charges against him.
More than 100 women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct since 2017. The Miramax co-founder, who was once celebrated as the force behind many iconic films including “Pulp Fiction,” “Good Will Hunting” and “The English Patient,” has now been erased from the film industry’s collective memory. The studio that bore his name is gone and the awe he once instilled replaced by disgust.
Following the initial charges, Weinstein was indicted last year on additional counts of sexual assault. Among that new group of accusers was Jennifer Siebel Newsom, now California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife, who alleged that Weinstein raped her during a meeting that was supposed to be about her nascent acting career.
During two days of emotional testimony last month, Siebel Newsom said a group of Weinstein’s aides left her alone with Weinstein in a hotel suite. They discussed foreign film projects, but he seemed disinterested and retreated to a bathroom, she recalled. He emerged in a robe and started masturbating, she testified. For the next 45 minutes, she said, Weinstein repeatedly tried to coerce her into sex, claiming a number of other A-list actresses had slept with him to advance in Hollywood.
Siebel Newsom said that during the rape she felt “like a blow-up doll.” Eventually, she said, she made “pleasure noises” in the hopes of ending the assault.
“I’m shaking. I’m crying. He knows this is not consent at all,” she testified.
In her closing argument, Deputy District Attorney Marlene Martinez told jurors the attack on Siebel Newsom was one of several that showed Weinstein had a predatory method. He used the promise of career advancement to get women alone, and after an assault would arrange more meetings with the women or offer them film roles, Martinez said. The follow-up meetings or offers, she argued, were done to guard against rape accusations by making it appear the women willingly traded sex for professional help.
“For this predator, hotels were his trap,” Martinez said. “Confined within those walls, victims were not able to run from his hulking mass. People were not able to hear their screams.”
Weinstein has denied all wrongdoing. His defense attorneys, Mark Werksman and Alan Jackson, argued the assaults alleged by Jane Doe 1 and Young never happened. The attorneys acknowledged Weinstein had sexual relationships with Siebel Newsom and Juls Bindi — a masseuse who alleged that Weinstein groped her and masturbated in front of her in 2010 — but Werksman described their interactions as “transactional.”
Bindi, they said, was offered a book deal by Miramax’s publishing arm after their encounter. Siebel Newsom stayed in touch with Weinstein about future film projects and later solicited Weinstein, a high-level donor to Democrats, for contributions to her husband’s campaigns.
The defense attorneys also argued that many of the women had been opportunists, taking advantage of the wave of anger toward powerful, abusive men that fueled the #MeToo movement to rewrite what had been consensual “casting couch” relationships as rape.
In his opening statement, Werksman said Siebel Newsom‘s rape allegations were the only thing keeping her from being “just another bimbo” who slept with Weinstein to advance her acting career.
During his closing argument, Jackson said the prosecution’s case was built off emotion, rather than fact. No witnesses could corroborate the assaults, he said. And while the allegations against Weinstein may have helped make the phrase #MeToo ubiquitous, Jackson reminded jurors that social movements were not evidence.
“I don’t know how to say it more gentle than this, but fury does not make fact,” he said. “Tears do not make truth.”
