Another Harvey Weinstein Rape Retrial Could Start This Fall, Judge Says; Current Case Ends In Mistrial As Jury Foreman Won't Return To Deliberations

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21 hours ago

(Updated with more details) The rape retrial of Harvey Weinstein is over with the New York jury foreman refusing to return to deliberations, but the much accused producer remains incarcerated and another trial is on the horizon.
The judge in Weinstein's retrial declared a mistrial this morning on the remaining, undecided charge of third degree rape involving accuser Jessica Mann. Judge Curtis Farber's ruling came after the jury's foreman, who claimed again told the judge in open court — and away of the other jurors — that he did not want to go rejoin his colleagues into the jury room.
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Are you willing to go back into the jury room today and continue deliberations?' Judge Farber asked Juror No. 1 today. 'No, I'm sorry,' he replied from his seat alone on the jury bench.
Yesterday in a near unprecedented move, the jury found Weinstein guilty of a first-degree criminal sexual act against Miriam Haley and not guilty of the same act against Kaja Sokola. In this retrial that started in late April, the single count of third-degree rape the ailing 73-year-old Weinstein faces carries a maximum sentence of four years. However, each first-degree criminal sexual act count carries a maximum sentence of 25 years.
Judge Farber has said that the Haley and Sokola verdicts will stand regardless of today's partial mistrial.
Once clarification was given on the state of the other verdict delivered on Wednesday, prosecutors told the court that Mann is 'ready and willing' to testify again in a retrial. In response Judge Farber set July 2 as the next hearing date, which could see a start date penciled in for the next retrial. Judge Farber guessed from the bench that the next retrial would happen in the fall.
Weinstein's defense lawyers were quick to urge the judge to speed up sentencing on the single guilty count. However, interestingly, Judge Farber declined. In another dramatic move on a dramatic morning, he told the courtroom Thursday he would not separate the Mann charge from the indictment under which he was convicted Wednesday of assaulting Haley.
Which means Harvey Weinstein won't know for many months how long he is going to sit in a New York state prison on this Empire State sex crimes.
With Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg expected to address today's events soon, lead defense lawyer Arthur Aidala said outside the courthouse that Weinstein will be appealing the Haley verdict. The attorney stated that jury misconduct would form the basis of the appeal.
Every before today's shocking developments, the foreman had come before the judge repeatedly since Friday, in court and in chambers, to say he felt threatened by other jurors. After declaring the mistrial, Judge Farber brought the full jury out to tell them he was ending their deliberations. 'I understand this particular deliberation was more heated than some others,' he said, with some understatement.
When Judge Farber excused the jury, the foreman exited first, walking through a side door at a noticeably quicker pace than the other men and women behind him. Judge Farber also left the courtroom for a brief spell. When he returned, the judge said to the lawyers and others in the court that he had spoken to the other eleven jurors to thank them for their work. Judge Farber added that 'all eleven' spontaneously expressed to him that they were 'extremely disappointed' they did not get to complete their deliberations.
'They did not understand why the foreperson bowed out,' Farber proclaimed 'They thought they were still in the course of deliberations and were hopeful to reach a verdict.' He continued with some lament: 'They did not describe anything that rose to the level of threats.'
Up until this unique morning, to put it mildly, the seven-woman, five-man panel have been in deliberations since June 4 with tensions emerging repeatedly. It took five days for a previous Empire State jury took to reach a verdict in Weinstein's 2020 sex crimes trial. Sentenced to 23 years in state prison five years ago, Weinstein saw that case tossed out last year by a New York Court of Appeals based on its decision of the improper inclusion of prior bad acts testimony by the previous judge.
After days of open tension out of the jury room, the foreman Wednesday came to Judge Farber expressing frustration and even fear in what was going on behind closed doors. Amid all that drama, the judge rejected the foreman's efforts to exit the case and denied a defense motion to get a mistrial declared. However, to cool things off a bit, Judge Farber did send the panel home early on June 11.
Weinstein may not have taken the stand, but he was very vocal in court Wednesday. 'This is my life that's on the line, this is not fair,' he proclaimed. 'I'm not getting a fair trial.'
Judge Farber's early exit decision on June 11 was preceded by getting a partial verdict out of the jurors. Having created a possible legal mess, the jury found Weinstein guilty on Count 1 of a criminal sexual act in the first degree against Miriam Haley. Pressed by the judge for an answer, the jury also found the ex-mini-mogul not guilty of the same charge involving Sokola, and offered no verdict Wednesday on Jessica Mann.
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Still incarcerated due to his 16-year sentence on a 2022 rape conviction in Los Angeles, the much-accused Weinstein and his team have spent the past several months trying to rehabilitate the ex-Miramax boss' reputation with the anticipation of the #MeToo backlash of the past year or so. Weinstein had a self-pitying and widely covered jailhouse conversation with right-wing commentator Candace Owens in March. That effort saw the likes of the hugely influencial Joe Rogan express a reassessment of Weinstein. Ignoring the fact that Weinstein's case is in state court, not federal, some have even floated that Donald Trump could pardon the one-time big-time Democratic donor.
On June 6, via phone, Weinstein told Fox 5's Good Day New York that while he acted 'immorally, nothing he ever did was 'illegal.' This is despite the fact that more than 100 women, from the famous to interns and others, have come forward since the deeply sourced 2017 New York Times exposé of Weinstein to tell their tales of abuse and assault by him. Allegations that Weinstein has been convicted of on both coasts and settled in several civil cases with big payoffs.
It is money and fame that is behind most of these claims, the defense has been asserting in the retrial.
Last week, defense lawyer and frequent CNN guest Arthur Aidala told the jury in his closing argument that accusers Jessica Mann, Miriam Haley and Kaja Sokola are 'all women with broken dreams … they're all women who wanted to cut the line.' Portraying the trio of accusers as having engaged in consensual sex with Weinstein, Aidala, who represented Steve Bannon in the MAGA warlord's fundraising fraud case, attempted to make his client the real victim. The lawyer pointed the finger at Mann, former Project Runway production assistant Haley and Polish model Sokola for using 'their youth, their beauty, their charm, their charisma to get stuff' from Weinstein.
In the prosecution's closing argument, with her boss Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg looking on in the courtroom, Assistant DA Nicole Blumberg offered a perspective on Weinstein's decades of power in Hollywood, making and breaking careers. 'He also used that same power to isolate women, to trap women into places where he'd be alone with them and to rape them,' she told the jury. 'That's not fame,' Blumberg added of the trio coming forward to tell their stories publicly — again, in two cases. 'Nobody wants that.'
Making that point more bluntly, Haley at one juncture in her highly emotional testimony called Weinstein a 'f*cking assh*le' on the stand. The witness later ran out of the courtroom crying under intense questioning from defense lawyer Jennifer Bonjean over what she was wearing the night in 2006 when she claims Weinstein forced himself on her in his Soho apartment.
Regardless of the verdict the New York jury could have delivered and a new jury may deliver on the next retrial, Weinstein still has his L.A. conviction to deal with. If the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love producer is found innocent on all the East Coast charges, he will be packed on a plane in a matter of days to sit in a cell on the West Coast while the appeal of his L.A. case continues.
Which is to say, despite the partial mistrial today Harvey Weinstein isn't going to be a free man anytime soon.
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