Verdict reached in Harvey Weinstein’s trial on rape and sexual assault charges in Los Angeles

A Los Angeles jury has reached a verdict within the second prison trial of the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault by a number of girls. The trial lasted greater than 4 weeks and included testimony from 49 witnesses. The end result is anticipated to be introduced in court docket shortly.

Weinstein, 70, was charged with seven prison counts involving 4 totally different girls. The fees included three counts of forcible rape, two counts of sexual battery by restraint, one depend of forcible oral copulation and one depend of sexual penetration by a international object. He pleaded not responsible to all the costs.

Weinstein is already serving a 23-year prison sentence after a New York jury convicted him in 2020 of rape within the third diploma and a first-degree prison intercourse act. 

The previous Hollywood mogul and co-founder of the leisure firm Miramax — which produced acclaimed motion pictures like “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love” — grew to become the main target of a litany of intercourse abuse allegations that helped spark the rise of the #MeToo motion 5 years in the past.

He initially confronted 11 fees in Los Angeles that would have amounted to a 65-year prison sentence had the jury discovered him responsible on all counts. Nevertheless, in a call introduced final month, Superior Court docket Decide Lisa Lench dropped four of the original charges towards Weinstein involving an accuser recognized in an indictment as Jane Doe #5. The fifth accuser was not talked about in prosecutors’ opening statements and he or she didn’t testify throughout Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial. The Los Angeles County District Lawyer’s Workplace has not defined why these counts have been dropped.

The allegations introduced towards Weinstein in Los Angeles immediately concerned 4 girls, all of whom have been known as Jane Doe in court docket, and an extra 4 appeared in court docket to testify. Two accusers remained nameless. The primary, often called Jane Doe #1, a Russian actor and mannequin now based mostly in Italy, gave an emotional three days of testimony and was the primary witness to take the stand. The second, Jane Doe #3, testified that Weinstein trapped her in a resort toilet and assaulted her when she was employed to provide him a therapeutic massage in 2010. 

The opposite accusers have recognized themselves publicly. They’re Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the spouse of California Governor Gavin Newsom, who testified in mid-November; Lauren Younger, the one accuser who testified towards Weinstein at each his Los Angeles and New York trials; Kelly Sipherd; Ambra Battilana Gutierrez; Natassia Malthe; and Ashley Matthau. 

Weinstein’s prison trial in Los Angeles adopted his first widely-publicized trial in New York. In February 2020, he was convicted of rape within the third diploma and a first-degree prison intercourse act, however was discovered not responsible of three different, extra severe fees, together with predatory sexual assault, which may have led to a life sentence. Weinstein is at present interesting the New York conviction.

More than 80 women have come ahead with accusations of sexual assault and misconduct towards Weinstein stretching again a number of a long time. A lot of them spoke out on the heels of 2017 experiences by The New York Instances and New Yorker that originally uncovered the allegations and shared some girls’s tales.

The investigative experiences, and the wave of allegations towards Weinstein that adopted, served as catalysts within the reckoning over sexual misconduct and absuses of energy, in Hollywood and elsewhere, that swept the nation and got here to be often called #MeToo. In a series response generally referred to as the Weinstein impact, folks more and more spoke out about their experiences with sexual assault and misconduct involving influential or in any other case highly effective males.

Amongst those that have publicly accused Weinstein of misconduct in some kind are actors Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan, Kate Beckinsale, Cate Blanchett, Rosanna Arquette, Salma Hayek, Helena Bonham Carter and Paz de la Huerta, together with many extra.