NEW YORK — Opening statements began Wednesday in Harvey Weinstein ’s rape retrial, five years after his original #MeToo trial delivered a searing reckoning for one of Hollywood’s most powerful figures.
Emphasizing the former studio boss’s onetime influence in the movie industry, prosecutor Shannon Lucey said Weinstein used “dream opportunities as weapons” to prey on the three accusers in the case. He is charged with raping one and forcing oral sex on the other two.
“The defendant wanted their bodies, and the more they resisted, the more forceful he got,” Lucey said.
The case is being retried because an appeals court threw out the landmark 2020 conviction.
The retrial is happening at the same Manhattan courthouse as the first trial, and two accusers who testified then are expected to return.
Weinstein’s retrial is playing out at a different cultural moment than the first, which happened during the height of the #MeToo movement. Along with the charges being retried, he faces an additional allegation from a woman who wasn’t involved in the first case.
The jury counts seven women and five men — unlike the seven-man, five-woman panel that convicted him in 2020 — and there’s a different judge.
The #MeToo movement, which exploded in 2017 with allegations against Weinstein, has also evolved and ebbed.
At the start of Weinstein’s first trial, chants of “rapist” could be heard from protesters outside.
TV trucks lined the street, and reporters queued for hours to get a seat in the packed courtroom. His lawyers decried the “carnival-like atmosphere” and fought unsuccessfully to get the trial moved from Manhattan.
This time, over five days of jury selection, there was none of that.
Those realities, coupled with the New York Court of Appeals’ ruling last year vacating his 2020 conviction and 23-year prison sentence — because the judge allowed testimony about allegations Weinstein was not charged with — are shaping everything from retrial legal strategy to the atmosphere in court.
Weinstein, 73, is being retried on a criminal sex act charge for allegedly forcibly performing oral sex on a movie and TV production assistant, Miriam Haley, in 2006 and a third-degree rape charge for allegedly assaulting an aspiring actor, Jessica Mann, in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013.
Weinstein also faces a criminal sex act charge for allegedly forcing oral sex on a different woman at a Manhattan hotel in 2006. Prosecutors said that the woman, who hasn’t been named publicly, came forward days before his first trial but wasn’t part of that case. They said they revisited her allegations when his conviction was thrown out.
The Associated Press does not generally identify people alleging sexual assault unless they consent to be named, as Haley and Mann have done.
Weinstein has pleaded not guilty and denies raping or sexually assaulting anyone. His acquittals on the two most serious charges at his 2020 trial — predatory sexual assault and first-degree rape — still stand.
Lindsay Goldbrum, a lawyer for the unnamed accuser, said Weinstein’s retrial marks a “pivotal moment in the fight for accountability in sex abuse cases” and a “signal to other survivors that the system is catching up — and that it’s worth speaking out even when the odds seem insurmountable.”
This time around, the Manhattan district attorney’s office is prosecuting Weinstein through its Special Victims Division, which specializes in such cases, after homicide veterans helmed the 2020 version. At the same time, Weinstein has added several lawyers to his defense team — including Jennifer Bonjean, who is involved in appealing his 2022 rape conviction in Los Angeles. She helped Bill Cosby get his conviction overturned and defended R. Kelly in his sex crimes case.
“This trial is not going to be all about #MeToo. It’s going to be about the facts of what took place,” Weinstein’s lead attorney, Arthur Aidala, said recently. “And that’s a big deal. And that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
But there has already been some talk of #MeToo. A prosecutor asked prospective jurors whether they’d heard of the movement. Most said they had, but that it wouldn’t affect them either way.
Others went further.
A woman opined that “not enough has been done” as a result of #MeToo. A man explained that he had negative feelings about it because his high school classmates had been falsely accused of sexual assault.
Another man said he viewed #MeToo like other social movements: “It’s a pendulum. It swings way one way, then way the other way, and then it settles.”
None of them is on the jury.
