ex-producer found guilty in Los Angeles of rape and two sexual assaults

Former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was found guilty on Monday, December 19, of rape and two sexual assaults at the end of his trial in Los Angeles (California), almost half of the charges. for which he was being sued by four women.

After two weeks of deliberation, jurors found him guilty of all charges brought by the first of the four plaintiffs. They found him not guilty on the charges of a second woman, and they failed to agree on a verdict on the allegations made by the other two.

Accused of rape and sexual assault, the 70-year-old former film ‘king’, who produced award-winning hits like pulp Fiction Where The Artisthas already been sentenced in New York in 2020 to twenty-three years in prison for similar acts.

During this retrial on the West Coast of the United States, four women testifying anonymously accused the producer in great detail of forcing them to have sex in hotels in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles between 2004 and 2013 A fifth finally refused to testify.

Challenging hearings

After weeks of harrowing hearings, often interrupted by sobbing victims, the prosecution has painted Harvey Weinstein as an almighty ogre, whose stranglehold on Hollywood – the films he produced have received more than 330 nominations for Oscars and 81 statuettes – has long prevented its victims from speaking out, for fear of repercussions on their careers.

“There is no doubt that Harvey Weinstein was a predator”launched the prosecutor Marlene Martinez in her indictment. “And like all predators, he had a method”she insisted, calling on the jurors to “put an end to his reign of terror”.

“Hotels were his trap. Confined within these walls, the victims could not escape its imposing mass.summarized the magistrate, based on the similarities between the testimonies.

The ex-producer refused to testify during the hearing

The ex-producer, who has always assured that all his accusers were consenting, refused to testify during the hearing. The verdict of this new trial in Los Angeles is particularly important for him because after an initial refusal of justice, the Supreme Court of New York finally authorized him, in August, to appeal his conviction of 2020, which had constituted a major victory for the #metoo movement.

Combative, his defense systematically questioned the word of the four accusers, as well as that of other women heard as witnesses for facts that took place elsewhere than in Los Angeles. The accusation “fully rests” on the injunction ” believe me “denounced Alan Jackson, one of the producer’s lawyers.

According to him, two of the accusers described encounters that never took place. The other two had consensual relationships in exchange for favors in Hollywood, he argued, which they later regretted and turned into accusations as they rode the avalanche of revelations aimed at Harvey Weinstein at the start of the #metoo movement in 2017.

The lawyer particularly incriminated Jennifer Siebel-Newsom, the wife of the governor of California, Gavin Newsom; she revealed her identity during the trial. “Regrets are not at all the same thing as rapehe tackled. You can’t rewrite your own history, no matter who you’re married to. »

During two days of testimony, the actress recounted how a meeting in a hotel in Beverly Hills in 2005 turned into rape, after forty-five minutes of pressure from the producer. ” I’m shaking. I’m crying. He knows it’s not consensual at all.”, she explained in tears. At the helm, she compared the method of Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, who questioned her very insistently, to that of their client. “What you are doing today is exactly what he did to me”she breathed.

In total, nearly 90 women, including Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Rosanna Arquette, have accused Harvey Weinstein of harassment, sexual assault or rape. But the statute of limitations has been exceeded in many of these cases, some dating back to 1977.

The ex-producer is also charged in the United Kingdom for sexual assaults which date back to 1996.