Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan Criminal Court, Wednesday, May 29, 2024, in New York. The fallen movie mogul is awaiting a retrial on rape charges after his 2020 conviction was tossed out. Wednesday’s court hearing addressed various legal issues related to the upcoming trial, which is tentatively scheduled for some time after Labor Day.
Weeks after Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned in New York, the disgraced film mogul filed an appeal to overturn a separate rape and sexual assault conviction in California.
Weinstein filed his appeal in the Los Angeles case in the 2nd District Court of Appeal Friday, according to court documents obtained by NBC News. He is requesting a new trial.
“Harvey Weinstein was tried by a system devoted to ‘getting him’ at all costs. This appeal demonstrates nearly a dozen areas of brazen legal missteps that violated his right to a fair trial,” Weinstein’s publicist Juda Engelmayer said in a statement to NBC News on Thursday. “We know he has a solid case here.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Lawyers for Weinstein claim in the appeal that Weinstein “stands wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting Jane Doe 1.”
The former Hollywood producer was found guilty in 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexually assaulting a woman known as Jane Doe 1, referred to as JD1 in the appeal documents, in the Los Angeles trial. Weinstein is serving a 16-year sentence stemming from that conviction.
He was found not guilty of sexual battery by restraint against a woman who was known in court as Jane Doe 2. In the same case, the jury was unable to reach a decision on three sexual assault counts Weinstein was facing, involving two more women known as Jane Doe 3 and Jane Doe 4.
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The L.A. conviction came nearly three years after his New York trial, in which he was convicted in 2020 of two felonies — third-degree rape and first-degree criminal sex act.
Those New York charges were overturned in April after an appeals court found the judge in the case had prejudiced Weinstein with improper rulings, including letting women share testimony and allegations that weren’t part of the case. Weinstein had been serving a 23-year sentence in a New York prison.
Weinstein, who is being held at Rikers Island in New York, could be facing a potential new trial in that state. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicated that he is interested in retrying the Weinstein case, but no official trial date has been set.
Lawyers for Weinstein allege in the California appeal that he was not given a “fair opportunity to defend against JD1’s allegations,” and given the close nature of the case, the jury likely would have acquitted him because “the prosecution’s case as to JD1 was weak and premised, in part, on evidence it knew was false.”
“The jury was misled about JD1’s truthfulness and precluded from considering game-changing evidence that pointed to Defendant’s innocence and contradicted the prosecution’s theory of guilt,” Weinstein’s lawyers wrote in the appeal.
The appeal rehashes the nature of the charges involving Jane Doe 1, who alleged Weinstein showed up at her hotel room uninvited and “raped her for over an hour” while she was visiting for the Los Angeles Italia Film Festival in 2013, according to the document.
Jane Doe 1 alleged in the trial that the only person who knew where she was staying at the time was the founder and host of the event, who was a friend of hers, according to the appeal.
The appeal says the prosecution “theorized” that the founder “lured the Defendant to his festival by offering JD1 as sexual bait and then provided her hotel information to the Defendant.”
Weinstein’s lawyers say that story is “false.” Its “flaw,” they argue, is that Jane Doe 1 and the event founder were actually in a romantic relationship, so it would have been unlikely that the founder would have introduced her to Weinstein if they were “in the throes of their own torrid affair.”
Weinstein’s lawyers argue the prosecution could not explain why Weinstein targeted Jane Doe 1 or how he could have found her without the event host’s help.
The appeal argues that Weinstein’s Sixth Amendment right to present a defense was violated because the defense was unable to use evidence that proved their romantic relationship.
Further evidence about Jane Doe 1’s whereabouts at the time she said Weinstein raped her was also withheld, the appeal claims. Based on messages that were unable to be presented in court, Weinstein’s lawyers say, they believe Jane Doe 1 was with the festival founder at the time.
“When the trial court sanitized the messages, leaving the jury with the false impression that JD1” and the founder “were simply ‘friends,’ it gutted Defendant’s defense, interfered with his ability to prove his innocence, and permitted the prosecution to advance a narrative that everyone in the courtroom, but the jury, knew was false,” the appeal argues.
NBC News has reached out to the founder for comment.
Among the other grievances detailed in the appeal, Weinstein’s lawyers claim they were forbidden from cross-examining Jane Doe 1 about her financial situation, including that she feared being evicted. The appeal alleged the jury was “left with another false impression of JD1, namely that she had no financial interest in the outcome of the case.” It said she stated she would not sue Weinstein, which she did a month later, according to the appeal.
The appeal says “three of the jurors who sat on the Defendant’s trial immediately regretted signing a guilty verdict upon learning that they were denied critical evidence showing that JD1” and the event founder “had an ongoing romantic relationship and had lied to them,” and that the jurors “explained that if they had access to such evidence it would have changed their calculus of whether any rape occurred.”
“Gutting the Defendant’s defense, as the trial court did, deprived Defendant of his constitutional rights to present a defense and led to a miscarriage of justice,” the appeal argues.
Weinstein’s lawyers also said jurors were told during selection that the mogul was previously convicted of rape in New York, arguing that a “fair and impartial trial was doomed from the start.” Additionally, they said, the prosecution was allowed to “present evidence of twelve uncharged sex offenses, some dating back decades,” that “added nothing to the jury’s consideration of whether the prosecution satisfied its burden on the charged counts.”
“The introduction of this excessive, cumulative, and remote evidence of prior ‘sexual assaults’ simply signaled to the jury that the Defendant was a bad man who should be convicted of something irrespective of whether the prosecution proved its case,” Weinstein’s lawyers wrote in the appeal.
Weinstein’s team said he is “entitled to a new trial where his constitutional rights are safeguarded, where he is permitted to present evidence of his innocence, and where his conduct is on trial — not his character.”
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