NEW YORK — Five years after Harvey Weinstein’s New York trial for sex crimes, a watershed moment in the #MeToo era, the disgraced Hollywood mogul is back in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday for the start of a new trial.
Weinstein, 73, was convicted in 2020 of rape and criminal sexual act, while the jury acquitted him on three other charges, including accusations that he was a sexual predator. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
The state’s highest court overturned that conviction last April in a fiercely contested 4-3 decision that reverberated through the country as much as the guilty verdict had years before. In their ruling, the judges said Weinstein had been deprived of a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to call witnesses who said he had assaulted them, but whose accusations were not backed by physical evidence and were not the basis for any of the charges against him. The court ordered a new trial.
For many in the legal world, the decision was not shocking — the case against Weinstein was seen as having tested the limits of New York’s laws. But for victims of sexual assault and advocates who support them, the overturning of his conviction was seen as a setback and stirred fresh doubts about the legal system’s ability to hold influential people to account. And in the years since Weinstein was originally found guilty, broader worries have grown that the effects of the #MeToo movement on the nation’s culture and politics, from Hollywood to the White House, have faded.
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The new trial offers the Manhattan district attorney’s office a chance to reprosecute a person who at one time appeared untouchable and in a kind of case that was rarely pursued in the past.
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Weinstein has also been convicted in California on sex-crime charges and faces a prison term there. He is appealing the California conviction.
“I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” he said in a statement Monday. “Tomorrow, I walk into court a free man in New York — and I expect to walk out the same way.”
Immediately after the appeals court’s decision, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said that he would prosecute Weinstein again (the earlier case had been tried by Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr.). Since then, the office has added a new sex-crime indictment against Weinstein.
Weinstein is again being tried on charges of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape based on complaints by a former television production assistant, Miriam Haley, and an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann. Both women testified in the 2020 trial and are expected to do so again.
He is newly charged with sexually assaulting an unidentified woman in a Manhattan hotel in 2006. Prosecutors told the court that the new complainant is someone they have known of since 2020 but who was only now ready to come forward.
Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex. On Tuesday, prosecutors and Weinstein’s defense team began choosing another jury to decide his fate, a process estimated to take several days. Weinstein’s team is being assisted by Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, a jury consultant who has worked on several high-profile cases.
Two groups of prospective jurors were sworn in Tuesday morning — totaling about 140 people — but after the judge informed them about the expected length of the trial and asked whether they could be “fair or impartial,” their numbers quickly dwindled. There were 47 people left by the afternoon.
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A gasp could be heard from one prospective juror, a woman, when Weinstein’s name was read aloud as she was sworn in.
Weinstein’s earlier case was not the first time Manhattan prosecutors had investigated reports of sexual crimes by the former producer. But the legal case against Weinstein has faced challenges.
In 2015, Vance, then the district attorney, declined to prosecute Weinstein, saying his office did not have enough evidence, despite an audio tape an Italian model made for police in which the producer apologized when she asked him why he had touched her breasts.
Feeling public pressure, Vance’s office pushed forward a case against Weinstein in 2018, which by the time it reached trial was built primarily around the accusations of three complaining witnesses. Two of the women — Haley and Mann — had admitted to having friendly communication with Weinstein after their alleged attacks, including agreeing to have sex with him, a point his defense team used to try to dismiss the charges.
To bolster the prosecution’s case, three other women were permitted to testify as Molineux witnesses, which means they were called to show a defendant’s pattern of behavior.
The case turned solely on whether a jury would believe the women’s testimony. Prosecutors did not have any physical evidence to support the women’s accounts. In addition, the trial judge, James Burke, ruled that if Weinstein took the stand, prosecutors could ask him about the allegations by the additional witnesses.
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Burke’s rulings on these points were “not harmless,” hampering Weinstein’s ability to defend himself, the state’s highest court later said.
“The result of the court’s rulings, on the one hand, was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant’s character before the jury,” the judges wrote. “On the other hand, the threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant’s right to testify.”
In the new trial, no one will testify solely as a Molineux witness. And if Weinstein decides to take the stand, prosecutors will be more limited in what they can ask him — for example, prosecutors can ask whether he was convicted on any felony charges in California, but they cannot ask him about the underlying facts of that case or what the charges were.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.