Harvey Weinstein found guilty of rape and sexual assault in Los Angeles trial

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A Los Angeles jury has found Harvey Weinstein guilty of rape and sexual assault, five years after dozens of women spoke out against the Hollywood producer and galvanized the #MeToo movement.

After more than nine days of deliberation, the jury convicted Weinstein of three counts of rape and sexual assault against one woman, a European model and actor who testified anonymously as “Jane Doe 1”, while remaining divided on three other charges of rape and sexual assault by two other accusers, including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California’s governor. Weinstein was also acquitted of a sexual battery allegation made by a fourth woman.

The guilty verdict on some of the most serious charges in the Los Angeles case, including forcible rape, seals the downfall of the former Hollywood powerbroker in the town where he once operated as a “king”. Weinstein, 70, who is already serving a 23-year prison sentence after a criminal conviction in New York in 2020, now faces a maximum of 18 to 24 additional years in prison.

But the jury’s inability to reach a verdict about the criminality of Weinstein’s actions toward two women, including Siebel Newsom, whose husband is widely expected to eventually run for president, may be a difficult outcome for some of the more than 90 women who have spoken out about being sexually assaulted or sexually harassed by Weinstein over the course of his decades-long career.

The verdict marks the second time Weinstein has been found guilty of sex crimes. The jury in Weinstein’s criminal trial in New York arrived at a similar mixed verdict, convicting the former producer of rape in the third degree and sexual assault, but acquitting him of predatory sexual assault and first degree rape.

The jury’s inability to reach a verdict on three of the seven criminal charges Weinstein faced, involving two different alleged victims, followed weeks of graphic, emotional testimony from eight women who testified that Weinstein raped or sexually assaulted them at hotels around the world, many of them during what they thought would be networking meetings about opportunities in the film industry. Weinstein only faced criminal charges in the case for the alleged assaults that happened in California, involving four of the women.

Some of the most emotional testimony of the trial came from Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker who is now married to the governor of California, Gavin Newsom.

Siebel Newsom testified that Weinstein assaulted and raped her during what she thought would be a business meeting in a hotel in 2005, when she was a young actor and producer still trying to find her way in the industry. Siebel Newsom wept repeatedly on the stand, calling the alleged attack “her worst nightmare”, and faced an aggressive cross-examination from Weinstein’s attorneys.

The jury could not reach a verdict on whether Weinstein forcibly raped and assaulted her, resulting in a mistrial on those charges.

“While we are heartened that the jury found Weinstein guilty on some of the counts, we are disappointed that the jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on Jane Doe 4,” Elizabeth Fegan, an attorney for Siebel Newsom, said in a statement.

But the “heroic actions” of all the women who testified “have ensured that Harvey Weinstein will likely spend the rest of his life in prison where he belongs, and that people like him understand the consequences of their actions,” Fegan said. “We are thankful that those jurors saw Weinstein for what he is – a serial predator.”

Siebel Newsom “will continue to fight for all women and all survivors of abuse against a system that permits the victim to be shamed and retraumatized in the name of justice,” Fegan said.

Throughout the trial, the prosecution painted a picture of Weinstein as a “predator” who used a pattern of manipulation and coercion to snare his prey. “For this predator, hotels were his trap,” said Marlene Martinez, an attorney in the case, during closing arguments. She pointed to patterns in testimony from the women who described Weinstein approaching and attacking them in similar ways.

Martinez said that Weinstein’s accusers were pursuing their dreams in Hollywood, but “at the end of that dream was the monster at the end of that table”.

‘He can’t do this to anyone else’

Weinstein, who chose not to testify, appeared shrunken and pale sitting in court as the weeks went on. As the first guilty verdicts were read on Monday, he appeared to put his head in his hands.

The 70-year-old had pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his attorneys staged an aggressive defense, attacking the credibility of his accusers and labeling Siebel Newsom a “bimbo”.

Legal observers said the blatant misogyny of Weinstein’s defense was striking, and seemed like a flashback to the tactics of the 1980s.

Weinstein’s defense argued that two accusers had made up the testimony, and that the others had engaged in consensual, transactional sex that they were trying to retroactively label as assault. Weinstein’s team alsohammered on graphic details including the sounds Siebel Newsom made during her alleged assault, as well as the accuracy of another accuser’s description of Weinstein’s genitalia.

In his closing arguments, defense attorney Alan Jackson warned the jurors not to be swayed by the influence of the #MeToo movement, and said that the testimony of eight different women had not produced evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that he had committed any crime.

“The truth is immutable. It’s not a feeling. It’s not a whim. It’s not a hashtag,” Jackson said. “The law is not captive to the shifting sands of a popular movement.”

Jackson called Siebel Newsom’s decision to speak out publicly against Weinstein in 2017, as other women had begun to speak out, a choice motivated by public perception: “She turned on him in a second, not because it was true, but because it was trendy,” Jackson said.

The Weinstein defense team’s personal attacks on Siebel Newsom, including the claims that “she must be lying, she must be doing it to get some personal gain” are the exact same tropes “that are used against all kinds of folks that we are supporting, truck drivers and agricultural workers and domestic workers”, said Jennifer Mondino, the director of the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund, which provides assistance to people who have experienced workplace sexual harassment.

“These are some of the reasons survivors are reluctant to come forward … the fear that people are going to raise these same stereotypes about them,” Mondino said.

Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor who specializes in criminal law, said the general public tends to underestimate juries and how carefully they weigh the evidence and the standard of reasonable doubt for each charge in a big case.

If jurors know they’re going to convict a defendant on some counts, “and they have a vague sense of how long the sentence will be”, Weisberg said, they may also feel more comfortable acquitting the defendant on other counts they’re less sure of, “because it’s not all or nothing”.

Weinstein originally faced 11 rape and assault charges from a total of five accusers, but prosecutors said halfway through the trial that the fifth accuser would not be testifying, and dropped four charges related to her.

Because a New York court has agreed to hear an appeal of Weinstein’s conviction, some of the dozens of women who have spoken out publicly against him have been worried that, like Bill Cosby, he could end up being released.

“If he was out right now, he would still be doing what he was doing before,” Dawn Dunning, 43, who testified in Weinstein’s New York trial, said ahead of the Los Angeles verdict. “It just worries me that’s even a possibility.”

To the women who testified in the New York trial, it “honestly didn’t matter” which counts the jury chose to convict on, and which they did not, Dunning said.

She said she expects the reaction of the women who testified in Los Angeles will be the same. “It doesn’t matter what the charges are,” she said. “We just want him to stay in prison so he can’t do this to anyone else.”