Harvey Weinstein's defense case begins in sex crimes retrial. Will he be a witness?
NEW YORK (AP) — After five weeks of testimony from Harvey Weinstein 's accusers and other prosecution witnesses at his sex crimes retrial, his defense has started presenting its own witnesses. But it's unclear whether the ex-studio boss himself will be one of them.
He's due to decide by end of court Thursday whether to testify. If he does, it would be a remarkable twist — and potentially risky legal move — in the yearslong saga of the onetime Hollywood honcho-turned-#MeToo outcast.
Weinstein, 73, is being retried on rape and sexual assault charges because New York's highest court overturned his 2020 conviction. He denies the allegations, and his attorneys maintain that anything that happened between him and his accusers was consensual.
Weinstein didn't testify at his original trial. Many defendants in criminal cases don't.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees that they don't have to. Jurors are told that they can't hold such silence against defendants and that it's up to prosecutors to prove their case; defendants do not need to prove anything. If defendants do take the stand, they open themselves to pointed questioning from prosecutors.
Weinstein's lawyers began calling witnesses late Wednesday, starting with a physician-pharmacist discussing a medication that had come up in testimony.
In the weeks prior, the defense asked plenty of questions aimed at raising doubts about the credibility and accuracy of what jurors were hearing from prosecution witnesses, particularly Weinstein's three accusers in the case.
Two of the women allege that he forcibly performed oral sex on them, separately, in 2006. The third says he raped her in 2013.
All three were trying to build careers in show business and say he preyed on them by dangling work prospects.
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CNN
34 minutes ago
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The entirely predictable Trump-Musk divorce threatens Musk's business empire
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Associated Press
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Live Updates: In Chaotic Economy, Hiring Likely Remained Steady in May
Matt Minich, who was fired from his job with the Food and Drug Administration in February, was one of thousands swept up in the mass layoffs of probationary workers at the beginning of President Trump's second administration. After Matt Minich was fired from his job with the Food and Drug Administration in February, he did what many scientists have done for years after leaving public service. He looked for a position with a university. Mr. Minich, 38, was one of thousands swept up in the mass layoffs of probationary workers at the beginning of President Trump's second administration. The shock of those early moves heralded more upheaval to come as the Department of Government Efficiency, led by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, raced through agency after agency, slashing staff, freezing spending and ripping up government contracts. In March, about 45 minutes after Mr. Minich accepted a job as a scientist in the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, the program lost its federal grant funding. Mr. Minich, who had worked on reducing the negative health impacts of tobacco use, observed that he had the special honor of 'being DOGE-ed twice.' 'I'm doubly not needed by the federal government,' he said in an interview. He is still hunting for work. And like hundreds of thousands of other former civil servants forced into an increasingly crowded job market, he is finding that drastic cuts to grants and contracts in academia, consulting and direct services mean even fewer opportunities are available. Some states that were hiring, another avenue for former federal government employees, have pulled back. So, too, have the private contractors typically seen as a landing place. The situation is expected to worsen as more layoffs are announced, voluntary departures mount and workers who were placed on administrative leave see the clock run out. Image More than 700 people attended a recent resource fair in Arlington, Va., to receive free consultation, professional headshots and workshops. Credit... Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times With Mr. Musk's time in Washington now done, a fuller picture of just how completely he and Mr. Trump have upended the role of government is coming into view. Federal tax dollars underpin entire professions, directly and indirectly, and the cuts led by Mr. Musk's operation have left some workers with nowhere to go. In Washington, D.C., and the surrounding area, the disruption has the hallmarks of the collapse of an industrial cluster, not unlike the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the upper Midwest during the 2000s. Except this time, it is moving at lightning speed. In January, just as Mr. Trump was taking office, the civilian federal work force across the country had reached a post-World War II peak of 2.3 million, not including the Postal Service. Few agencies have publicly stated how many people have been fired or voluntarily resigned, but a rough count shows that federal agencies have lost some 135,000 to firings and voluntary resignation, with another 150,000 in planned reductions. Contracted and grant-funded workers — which the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated to be as many as 4.6 million people — are harder to track in official data. The first contractor layoffs began in February with organizations that received funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, like Chemonics and FHI360. As more grants and contracts that were under review across government are terminated, job cuts have gained steam. Booz Allen Hamilton, the sprawling consulting firm based in Northern Virginia that gets 98 percent of its revenue from the federal government, announced that it was cutting 7 percent of its 36,000-person staff. Even providers of Head Start, the low-income preschool program, have issued layoff notices because funding has been in doubt. While the national labor market remains stable, job loss is starting to become notable in the capital region. Unemployment rates in the District of Columbia and most of its surrounding counties have been on the rise since December. The number of people receiving unemployment insurance has been elevated in Virginia and D.C. over the past several months. Job postings in Washington have dropped across the board, according to the hiring platform Indeed, including in opportunities for administrative assistance, human resources and accounting. Local government agencies around Washington are hosting dozens of hiring events, and most of them are packed. Elaine Chalmers of Woodbridge, Va., was among 750 people who attended a recent resource fair in Arlington, Va., just outside Washington. The event offered free consultation for updating résumés, as well as professional headshots and workshops, including one on managing personal finances during a transition in employment. Image Elaine Chalmers of Woodbridge, Va., resigned from her role at the Agriculture Department to escape the stress and uncertainty created by new mandates. Credit... Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times It was the fourth one she attended in the month since she left the Agriculture Department, where she had worked for 20 years, most recently in the division that ensured equal access to grants for rural communities. She resigned to escape the stress and uncertainty created by new mandates, such as erasing words like 'equity' and 'diversity' from department communications. 'It just became almost a character question for myself,' said Ms. Chalmers, 53. 'I couldn't honorably stay.' Like many of the federal workers who chose to take a deferred resignation or early retirement, one of the tools the administration has used to shrink the work force, she is on leave and will be paid through September. It is a relief, she said, because she is the sole caregiver for her mother and 15-year-old son. But the prospects do not look good. Ms. Chalmers said she expected to have to take a pay cut. She said she applied for more than 100 jobs in the week before the job fair and received several automated emails informing her that she did not get the position. For many government workers, career transitions can be especially daunting because their jobs are often extremely specific, performing functions that do not exist in the private sector. 'For a lot of them, it's almost like starting from scratch,' said Laura Moreno-Davis, a spokeswoman for WorkSource Montgomery, the work force agency for Montgomery County, Md., just outside D.C. 'If they really have a wealth of experience and knowledge, how can we best use that?' A new group formed by two former federal employees is trying to help people do that. 'How do you translate these skills that you've learned in the federal government that are so complex and seem to be so unique into something that can be communicated easily outside of the federal government?' said Julie Cerqueira, co-founder of the group, FedsForward. Ms. Cerqueira's partner, Karen Lee, said that people who worked in federal disaster recovery and resilience jobs, for example, had expertise that could easily transfer to private-sector work in contingency planning and supply chains. But it is not so simple for everyone. Chelsea Van Thof, 33, is a public health veterinarian who focused on diseases that spread from animals to humans, and humans to animals — a niche job even in government. A few weeks after the inauguration, the contract she worked under at the State Department was placed on hold for a 90-day review and ultimately terminated. Dr. Van Thof immediately lost her health insurance and took on a housemate to cover her rent. Image Chelsea Van Thof, a public health veterinarian, saw the contract she worked under at the State Department be placed on hold for a 90-day review and ultimately terminated a few weeks after President Trump's inauguration. Credit... Maansi Srivastava for The New York Times Plans for the future changed, too, as she had been counting on public-sector loan forgiveness to pay off her $250,000 in veterinary school debt, a prospect that now seems increasingly remote. She sometimes feels as though she is sending résumés into a void. 'I was just thankful when I got a rejection because it meant they saw my application,' she said. Like others in the science field, including Mr. Minich, she is looking for jobs outside the country. And in the meantime, she helped form a support group of about 80 wildlife protection conservationists who are in similar predicaments. People working on government contracts are hit especially hard because they are not eligible for the deferred resignation plans available to federal employees, and cannot look forward to their pensions. Todd Frank, of Westminster, Md., was given just a few minutes' notice before he was laid off as a technical writer on a contract with the Defense Department's science and technology directorate, helping get the appropriate gear out to military personnel in the field. Mr. Frank, 54, is now wrestling with whether to uproot his family to find a new job, which would come with steep trade-offs. His wife runs her own business — a licensed day care out of their home. His teenage sons do not want to leave their high school, he said. Lately, he is looking at the family's budget for where to make cuts. 'Not being able to buy a suit for prom sounds like rich people problems, but you don't want to turn around and tell your kid, 'You can't do this' or 'You can't do that,'' Mr. Frank said. Several states had advertised their eagerness to hire people laid off by the federal government in the early days of federal cuts. In March, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said the state would give hiring preference to former federal workers. Since then, the state government has received more than 7,300 applications from people who said they had federal experience, his office said, and so far, state agencies have hired 120 of them. But state jobs have gotten a lot more popular in recent months. Since March, former and current federal employees have sent in nearly 700 applications, California's human resources office said. Some states are having their own budget problems, in part brought on by uncertainty around the continuation of federal funding. Alaska, Massachusetts, Indiana, Louisiana and New Hampshire have implemented hiring freezes. Public health agencies in Ohio and Alaska have laid people off as grants were canceled. And a broad swath of universities have also paused new hires, including the University of California system, the University of Pennsylvania, and Emory University in Georgia. With the Trump administration's firings of scientists and grant cancellations from agencies including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, science and consulting have been hit especially hard, according to Indeed. Companies and nonprofits that helped evaluate whether federal programs were working, like American Institutes for Research, have let go up to a quarter of their payroll. Paro Sen, a research scientist in Cincinnati, was laid off in May along with most of the people in her office at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. She worked on industrial hygiene, studying worker exposures that cause chronic health problems, and visited Washington in May with her union to talk to members of Congress about the need to restore these jobs to the federal government. 'This was my dream job that I have been ripped from,' she said in an interview. Ms. Sen and her colleagues work in such a specialized field that they are competing for very few available jobs, especially if they want to stay where they are. 'The job market right now is not amazing,' said Ms. Sen, 29. 'Cincinnati is not a very big city, and you've got, suddenly, some of the smartest people in this field all applying and competing for the exact same jobs at the same time.'
