Latest news with #AlvinBragg
The Guardian
7 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Closing arguments begin in sexual misconduct trial of Harvey Weinstein
The third sexual misconduct trial of former movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was rapidly heading toward a conclusion on Tuesday, as prosecutors and the defense began delivering closing arguments in Manhattan criminal court. 'If there is a doubt about their case, you gotta throw it out,' defense attorney Arthur Aidala said of three women who testified against Weinstein. 'These are the people they want you to believe – they're all women with broken dreams.' He asked them to give his client the benefit of the doubt on rape and sexual assault charges. Prosecutors were set to begin their closing arguments later on Tuesday. Six weeks after prosecutors began laying out their case against him (largely a re-airing of a 2020 criminal prosecution, with one additional accuser, that was later overturned on appeal), the matter will be deliberated again by jurors, without Weinstein testifying. He is charged with assaulting three women in Manhattan between 2006 and 2013 – Mimi Haley, Jessica Mann and Kaja Sokola – and has been appearing in court each day in a wheelchair from Manhattan's Bellevue hospital, where he is being treated for a number of ailments, including chronic myeloid leukemia. Manhattan's district attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is facing re-election this year, opted to retry Weinstein soon after his first conviction on third-degree rape and a criminal sexual charge was vacated because prosecutors were found to have prejudiced the jury by calling witnesses whose testimony was unrelated to the charges. The decision to bring a second prosecution in New York required the 73-year-old Weinstein to be travel from California, where he was serving a 16-year sentence for sexual assault. The second New York trial avoided the most serious sexual assault charges that he was cleared of in 2020 to avoid double jeopardy. At trial, prosecutors have sought to establish that Weinstein used his power in the film industry to sexually assault and 'exert enormous control' over the three women, each of whom were seeking to gain a footing in the business. In opening statements, assistant DA Shannon Lucey said Weinstein had offered his accusers film scripts and promises of fame, and he 'used those dream opportunities as weapons'. Prosecutors avoided introducing so-called prior bad acts testimony – but brought an additional sex crimes charge related to Sokola, who accused Weinstein of performing oral sex on her in a Manhattan hotel on one occasion in early 2006. Weinstein's defense team pushed back on that claim, offering jurors the testimony of Helga Samuelsen, a friend of Sokola's, who said Weinstein had visited Sokola months earlier in their shared apartment and spent about a half hour in a bedroom with her. Sokola earlier testified that the alleged encounter had not happened. As with each of three women, Weinstein's defense offered evidence that their friendly relationship with the defendant pre-existed and post-dated the alleged sexual assaults – and each had received compensation from a payout fund established after allegations were made against the movie mogul, triggering a public reckoning over gender power dynamics that came to be known as the #MeToo movement. Sign up to Headlines US Get the most important US headlines and highlights emailed direct to you every morning after newsletter promotion Among the witnesses, Jessica Mann testified that she had what she considered a romantic relationship with Weinstein, who was then married. All three said they believed Weinstein could help them with their professional goals and maintained relationships with him, and, in some instances, he had helped them find work. Aidala told jurors that the three women had 'fooled around with him consensually', adding 'they were flirtatious, they were friendly, they wanted him, they needed him, he could change the trajectories of their lives'. But a clinical psychologist, testifying for the prosecution, said that for a variety of reasons, it is not unusual for sexual assault victims to remain on good terms with their assailants after an assault. In total, prosecutors introduced evidence from 24 witnesses during Weinstein's retrial. They included former assistants, friends of his accusers and workers at the hotels where the alleged assaults took place. Weinstein, who pleaded not guilty, elected not to testify in his defense – repeating the same decision he made in the earlier trials. Aidala said his client very much wanted to take the stand – and had been prepped to do so – before Weinstein decided against it as a matter of courtroom strategy. Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organizations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at
New York Times
18 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Weinstein's 2nd Sex Crimes Trial in New York Shifts to Closing Arguments
Closing arguments in the second New York sex crimes trial of Harvey Weinstein were set to begin on Tuesday, six weeks after prosecutors began laying out their case against him. Mr. Weinstein, the disgraced former Hollywood producer, is charged with attacking three women in Manhattan between 2006 and 2013. He was previously convicted of rape and a criminal sexual act about five years ago and had begun serving a 23-year state prison sentence when the conviction was overturned on appeal last spring. Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, and other prosecutors in his office opted to charge Mr. Weinstein again almost immediately, eventually bringing two counts of first-degree criminal sexual act and one count of third-degree rape against him. Over the past month and a half, prosecutors have sought to establish that Mr. Weinstein used his power in Hollywood to sexually assault and 'exert enormous control' over the three women, all of whom were seeking work in the film and television industry. He offered the women scripts and promises of fame, and he 'used those dream opportunities as weapons,' Shannon Lucey, an assistant district attorney, said during her opening statement. In all, prosecutors called 24 witnesses during the retrial, including Mr. Weinstein's former assistants; friends and relatives of his accusers; and workers at the hotels where he is accused of attacking the women. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Epoch Times
4 days ago
- Epoch Times
2nd Suspect in Manhattan Crypto Kidnapping and Torture Case Indicted
NEW YORK—A second man charged in the kidnapping and torture of an Italian man for his Bitcoin has been indicted. A Manhattan grand jury handed up the indictment Friday against William Duplessie, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office. The indictment will remain sealed until his arraignment June 11.
Mint
7 days ago
- Politics
- Mint
Why Has New York City Defied the Great American Crime Decline?
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Crime is falling across the US, with the monthly totals through March published by the Real Time Crime Index showing violent crime back roughly at pre-pandemic levels while property crime is much lower. The violent crime decline appears to have accelerated over the winter.(1) Crime has also been falling lately in the country's largest city. But the recent drop comes after years of increases, and crime remains much more prevalent in New York City than it was before the pandemic. Real Time Crime Index numbers are available only by state, but New York City represents 94% of the state population covered in these statistics, so they are a close enough approximation. The property crime numbers show a similar split, but for simplicity's sake I will stick with violent crime from here on. Why is there still so much more of it in New York City than before the pandemic? The most honest answer is a shrug: Researchers are sometimes able to ascertain whether a particular policy or event increased or decreased crime, but definitive answers as to what caused a crime wave are awfully hard to find — and as a guy wielding line charts rather than sophisticated causal inference methods, I'm not going to offer one here. Still, the lines do offer more support for some theories than others, lending ammunition to critics of bail reform and Eric Adams but not those who blame the 'Ferguson effect' or Alvin Bragg. One important detail to note is that while violent crime is up in New York City since before the pandemic, the most violent of crimes no longer is. If the 28.7% decline so far this year in murder and non-negligent manslaughter holds up, the city's murder rate will be the lowest since 1944. Even when it spiked upward in 2020 and 2021, New York's homicide rate (homicide encompasses murder and non-negligent manslaughter) was among the lowest for a large American city. Coupled with its minuscule rate of traffic fatalities, this makes New York City in a sense one of the safest places in the US, a surprising result about which I have opined repeatedly in print and video. But the risk in New York of being a victim of violent crime, chiefly robbery or aggravated assault, is not especially low by big-city US standards, and as already noted is much higher than before the pandemic. Aggravated assault's dominance of these statistics makes comparisons between cities a little iffy. Homicides hardly ever go unreported, assaults often do, plus police departments have some leeway in whether to report them as aggravated — defined by the FBI as 'an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury' — or simple. Just to complicate things more, the NYPD in its own crime statistics counts felony assaults, which are less numerous than the aggravated assaults that the department eventually reports to the state and FBI and that I have had to estimate for the above chart. Reporting of rape is if anything even less consistent over time and across jurisdictions. All in all, I'm much more confident in the murder statistics showing New York City to be very much on the safe side for a big city than in the violent crime numbers showing it to be somewhat on the dangerous side. Still, the larger numbers of aggravated assaults and robberies mean you're far more likely to experience them than murder, and comparisons of short and medium-term crime trends shouldn't be affected much by reporting inconsistencies. Here's a comparison of violent crime trends since the end of 2019 in New York and Minneapolis. I picked Minneapolis because it's where George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in May 2020, and it became the epicenter of the protest movement and calls to defund the police that followed. There's now a fair amount of serious research linking public outrage over killings by police to crime increases as police pull back on enforcement in the face of protests and political backlash — the so-called Ferguson effect. One can certainly make the case that this helps explain what happened in Minneapolis from 2020 to 2022. But in New York, which also had huge protests in 2020, violent crime didn't start going up until 2021 and only really took off after city voters elected as mayor a former police officer who called for big increases in enforcement. No, I don't think this means New York's crime wave was Eric Adams' fault, although it is striking how little success he has had in reining it in. Murder did go up sharply in New York City in 2020 and began falling in 2022, and the city's status as an early epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic surely played a role in suppressing other violent crime in 2020 and 2021 because New Yorkers went out less and visitors stayed away. The crime wave was thus perhaps a delayed reaction to causes that predated Adams. One of those causes may simply have been the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on New York's daily routines and economic conditions. In the late 2010s, for example, the city's unemployment rate was nearly identical to the nation's. Since March 2020, it has been markedly higher. Another elected official whose name comes up a lot in conjunction with New York's crime problems is Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a reformist progressive whose successful prosecution of President Donald Trump has made him a national target. Crime is indeed up in Manhattan since Bragg took office at the beginning of 2022, but it's up by more in the other four boroughs that together account for 80% of New York City's population, by much more in three of them. He's clearly not the culprit. Bragg isn't the only progressive DA in New York City, though, and I don't think it's crazy to suspect that some aspects of the criminal justice reforms adopted over the past decade in New York by prosecutors, the city council and the state legislature might have boosted crime rates. The highest-profile such reform in New York, signed into law by Governor Andrew Cuomo in April 2019, has been ending cash bail for all but the most serious felonies. There's persuasive evidence that for first-time offenders bail is counterproductive, as jail time increases the likelihood that they'll commit crimes again. But after the 2019 bail reform, judges in New York had limited leeway to jail repeat offenders they thought were likely to commit more crimes. By contrast, a 2017 bail reform in New Jersey was accompanied by a system of pretrial risk assessment aimed at keeping high-risk offenders behind bars while decreasing incarceration overall. County crime statistics, available through 2023, show markedly different trajectories in nearby New York and New Jersey jurisdictions. These charts don't prove anything. Lots of other factors could be driving the divergence. But research by the Data Collaborative for Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York has found that, while recidivism is down among first offenders in New York since bail reform, it's up for repeat offenders. And data from the New York City Criminal Justice Agency show both the number and percentage of people on pretrial release in the city who are rearrested for felonies to be markedly higher in 2024 than in 2019. Bail reform flaws seem as if they could explain at least some of New York City's stubborn crime problem. So what explains the decline in violent crime in the city over the past few months? Maybe several years of reforms to bail reform in Albany are beginning to have an impact. Maybe Jessica Tisch, whom Adams appointed as police commissioner in November, pretty much exactly when violent crime began to decline, really is doing a much better job than her predecessors. Another possible factor that I haven't mentioned — mainly because I don't have the data to chart it but also because the available evidence indicates that immigrants, including those here illegally, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans — is that the flow of asylum seekers into New York began to slow sharply last year. Most likely it's some mix of these and other forces that will never be satisfactorily disentangled. In any case, let's hope it keeps up. More From Bloomberg Opinion: (1) This chart represents the change in the number of crimes in 407 jurisdictions that provide timely monthly data; the US population has grown about 3% since 2020, so crime rates have likely fallen even more. Also, all the statistics I cite here represent crimes reported to the police. This isn't a perfect measure because not all crimes are reported the police, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that the percentage that are has been rising since 2020. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of 'The Myth of the Rational Market.' More stories like this are available on
Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Carpenters, Laborers unions endorse Manhattan DA Bragg for re-election
The New York City District Council of Carpenters, Laborers' International Union of North America and Mason Tenders are officially endorsing Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for re-election. These unions were major supporters of ex-Assistant District Attorney Diana Florence in her 2021 run against Bragg, where she ultimately finished fifth. Now, Florence is running again in a long-shot bid for Bragg's seat, this time as an independent. Bragg, who's running for a second term, has previously scooped the support of heavyweight unions 1199SEIU, United Federal of Teachers, DC37 and the Hotel Trades Union, and Manhattan congressional Reps. Nadler, Espaillat and Goldman. 'I am proud to stand alongside New York's working people to ensure they are not exploited or abused, and can earn a fair wage in safe conditions for doing the important work that each of us relies on every day,' Bragg said in a statement. Bragg tackled many high-profile cases in his second term, including Trump's hush-money conviction and the indictment of Luigi Mangione for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. 'For the past four years, Alvin Bragg has used his position to fight for working people time and again,' District Council of Carpenters President Paul Capurso said, referencing the DA's efforts targeting wage theft in the construction industry. Florence formerly worked under Former Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr. but resigned in controversy amid allegations she withheld evidence about a cooperating witness in a case. 'At a time when the justice system seems to cater too often to rich, politically connected insiders and elites, Alvin brings a refreshing fairness and a commitment to doing the right thing to one of the most important law enforcement agencies in the country,' Mason Tenders Business Manager Dave Bolger said, citing Bragg's creation of a Worker Protection Unit. Maud Maron, a former Legal Aid attorney, is running against Bragg as a Republican.
