The second day of Harvey Weinstein’s rape retrial in New York came to a close with defense lawyers seeking a mistrial. As dramatic as it sounds, the effort was cut short by Judge Curtis Farber within minutes, Deadline reports.
According to the report by Deadline, with the jury excused for the day, defense lawyers Arthur Aidala, Diana Fabi Samson and Jennifer Bonhean took turns moving for a mistrial, saying the testimony of Christine Pressman, a former friend of Harvey Weinstein accuser Miriam Haley, was prejudicial.
Specifically the defense team claimed the testimony should not have been allowed, especially when Pressman spontaneously said that Haley would “never ever ever” have had consensual sex with Weinstein.
Pressman was “not entitled to speculate about things she has no knowledge about,” Bonjean said.
From the start, Judge Farber sounded skeptical of the mistrial motion, telling the defense lawyers they opened the door to Pressman’s testimony with their own questioning. Judge Farber likened the defense lawyers’ conduct to putting a hand over a lit candle. “Sometimes you get burned,” he told them, denying the mistrial.
The court will not be in session on Friday or April 28. The trial is set to resume on April 29.
Before this mistrial motion, Thursday saw more testimony in the case.
Two on-and-off friends of Harvey Weinstein accuser Miriam Haley testified on Thursday that Haley told them in 2006 that the Pulp Fiction producer sexually assaulted her. One cried on the stand as she said she regretted the advice she gave in response.
Christine Pressman, her voice breaking, called it “wrong” in hindsight to warn Haley against reporting the assault to police. Pressman, a former model, actor and musician who said she cared for Haley like a younger sister, said the conversation about Weinstein happened in August or September of 2006 during a group stay in the East Hampton, N.Y. home of Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels.
“I said, ‘Harvey Weinstein is the king of New York. He is extremely powerful. You are not. You are here on a tourist visa. Just let it go,’ ” Pressman said she told Haley.
Haley, from Finland, was working as a production assistant for a Weinstein-produced reality television show, Project Runway, and being paid in cash. Weinstein was convicted in 2020 of sexually assaulting Haley before the verdict was overturned on appeal, leading to the retrial now underway.
Haley and Pressman first met in 1997 through a mutual contact, London theater producer Michael White, who at the time employed Haley as an assistant in his London office, and who had previously cast Pressman in a short-lived musical, Pressman told Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Nicole Blumberg.
Pressman said that White, known for productions of Oh! Calcutta and Rocky Horror Picture Show, hosted the annual summer stays at Lorne Michaels’ house in the wealthy Long Island enclave. Haley came to New York after White closed his office because of financial difficulties.
On cross-examination by defense lawyer Jennifer Bonjean, Pressman said she once told Haley to consider dating Weinstein. On follow-up questioning by Blumberg, she said that was before Haley said she’d been assaulted. “If she wanted to date him, I would have been very happy,” Pressman said. But Haley, she said, “had zero interest in dating him or sleeping with him.”
Pressman, who lives in Florida, testified that she and Haley are no longer close, and fell out “over political differences” which she did not detail. The friends did have a reunion dinner two years ago in New York. She also testified that she reached out to Haley two months ago, in February, because someone had gone through Pressman’s Instagram feed and liked all the older photos of her with Haley.
“That made me feel very uneasy,” Pressman said. “After that, I wished her happy birthday.” Haley later contacted her, she said, to let her know the Manhattan District Attorney’s office was trying to reach her
The testimony from Pressman and and the other friend, Elizabeth Entin, ran into numerous objections from Weinstein’s lawyers. With the jury out of the room, Bonjean got Judge Curtis Farber to strike from the record an answer that Pressman gave to Blumberg suggesting they spoke multiple times about the sexual assault.
Judge Farber told the jurors when they came back it not the room, “Forget you heard it.”
Entin, Haley’s ex-roomate, tangled often with Bonjean during a testy cross-examination interrupted by frequent objections from Blumberg.
Entin testified earlier that when Haley told her in the July of 2006 that she had been sexually assaulted by the Pulp Fiction producer, she said to call a lawyer. Bonjean asked Entin why she didn’t tell Haley to call the police — as she agreed she would have done if Haley had been robbed at gunpoint.
“Rape has a different stigma in our society and a different history,” Entin replied.
“You think you need an expert to tell you to call the police and report it?” Bonjean shot back, drawing an objection from Blumberg. Judge Farber upheld the objection to Bonjean’s argumentative question.
The sparring and the objections continued as Bonjean challenged Entin’s memory and motivations, and sought to portray her as a #MeToo movement partisan with an axe to grind against Weinstein.
Entin freely admitted to having no doubt that Weinstein raped Haley, and on the stand repeatedly referred without prompting to Weinstein as her friend’s rapist. Entin testified in 2019 to the first grand jury that indicted Weinstein for sexually assaulting Haley, a television production assistant, and for raping two other women: aspiring actress Jessica Mann and the actress Annabella Sciorra. A jury in 2020 convicted Weinstein for attacks against Haley and Mann; the verdict was tossed on appeal.
Bonjean read back excerpts from a self-published 2023 book by Entin in which she compared going to court against Weinstein to “war” and wanted to “rip someone apart.” Entin said the language was “hyperbolic” but reflected an “energy I needed” to overcome a fear of testifying in a high-profile, high-stakes case. In the book, she wrote that she felt many abused women’s experiences “were resting on my shoulders.”
Bonjean noted that Entin had publicly admitted that she “despised” Weinstein, accused Entin of “pontificating” on the stand, and that she had misspelled her friend’s name in the book. On redirect by Blumberg, Entin said she wasn’t aware when she wrote the book that Haley had legally changed her last name after the assault.
Entin said that she lost all contact with Haley after 2007 but they reconnected in 2020 and remain friends today.
Jurors at Harvey Weinstein’s rape retrial in New York City heard corroborating testimony this morning about a 2006 sexual assault by the Oscar-winning producer. The courtroom also was given a sample of the accused hobnobbing with the very rich and very influential during the height of his power.
A friend of Weinstein accuser Miriam Haley testified on Thursday that a “shaken” Haley confided to her in 2006 that the then-powerful producer had “forcibly put his mouth on her vagina without her consent.”
Elizabeth Entin, a New York-based author and podcaster who in 2006 shared an apartment in the city with Haley, said that one evening during that summer Haley stood in the doorway of Entin’s bedroom, looking “uncomfortable,” with her gaze averted, as she described what had happened between her and Weinstein.
Harvey Weinstein’s film and television portfolio included Project Runway, an MTV fashion-industry reality television show where Haley worked as a production assistant. Weinstein is charged with committing a first-degree sexual act against Haley inside his downtown Manhattan loft apartment in July of 2006.
Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Shannon Lucey said on Wednesday that a “nearly 300-pound” Weinstein backed 115-pound Haley into an apartment bedroom that night, pushed her on to a bed, placed his entire body weight on top of Haley and forced his mouth on to her vagina.When Haley protested and said she was wearing a tampon, Weinstein “simply yanked the tampon out and continued to forcibly orally rape Mimi,” said the prosecution in opening arguments.
Entin, in the second day of testimony at the 72-year-old Weinstein’s retrial for rape and sexual assault, said she responded to Haley’s revelation by telling her, “That sounds like rape. I think you should call a lawyer.”
Haley did not embrace the idea and they didn’t discuss the incident or how to handle it any further, Entin testified. But from that day forward, Haley’s behavior changed, and the spontaneous, fun-loving friend Entin had known became sadder and more subdued during their remaining months as roommates in New York’s East Village, Entin said.
“She spent a lot more time in her room,” Entin said. “She seemed to enjoy things a lot less.”
Having proclaimed his innocence of all charges and insisting the relationships were all “friends with benefits,” as one defense lawyer put it yesterday, Weinstein could spend the rest of his life in state prison if found guilty in this trial.
Before Entin took the stand Thursday, the second day of testimony in Weinstein’s retrial opened with a poignant instance of show and telling. Jurors were shown a series of the much-accused Pulp Fiction producer in his heyday to set the stakes. Big time Democratic donor Weinstein was shown sitting next to Hillary Clinton at a Finding Neverland film premiere in 2004, shaking hands with Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace in 2014, and chatting with Jennifer Lawrence at the 2013 Oscars Governors Ball in Hollywood.
In fact, the seven-woman-five-man panel saw more than two dozen images, of Weinstein and others attending gala events, flash by on a large flatscreen inside Judge Curtis Farber’s courtroom. In the collection were two pictures of Kaja Sokola, who Weinstein is charged with sexually assaulting inside a Manhattan hotel room in 2006.
On the first proper day of the retrial, after a full jury was seated on April 22, Weinstein spent Wednesday’s opening arguments seated between his lawyers with his gaze wandering between the judge and the jury box.
The only prosecution witness to testify on April 24 was a former Weinstein assistant, Stefan Sterns, who remembered seeing one of Weinstein’s accusers, Miriam Haley, in a New York hotel lobby in 2006 and on another occasion patching a call from Haley through to his boss.
Sterns’ testimony gave jurors a glimpse of Weinstein at the peak of his powers.
The former assistant said he traveled with the producer in 2006-2007 on private charter flights to the Sundance and Toronto film festivals, the BAFTA awards in London, and to meetings-filled Los Angeles business trips. Sterns said he carried three cell phones and two Blackberries on the road to manage Weinstein’s calls and emails. Also always close by was a locked, hardshell silver briefcase that belonged to Weinstein, although he didn’t carry it himself. It was a whirl of hotel suites, screenings and red carpets, and everywhere they went everybody simply knew Sterns’ boss as “Harvey.”
“That was the sort of swagger we walked into those film festivals with,” Sterns told Assistant Manhattan District Attorney Nicole Blumberg. They kept plenty of cash on hand to “grease the wheels” with $500 tips for hotel concierges and restaurant maître d’s, Sterns testified.
Prosecutors are saying Weinstein weaponized his fame, wealth and influence as they seek to make the guilty verdicts they won in 2020 stand up on retrial, while securing an additional conviction for commission of a first-degree criminal sexual act. Weinstein’s 2020 conviction in New York and his 23-year jail sentence were thrown out last year by an appeals court that ruled testimony from three so-called “uncharged” Weinstein accusers had unfairly prejudiced the jury against him.
On Wednesday, during opening arguments, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Shannon Lucey identified a third victim, Kaja Sokola, who hadn’t previously come forward and whose name had gone undisclosed in a new indictment against Weinstein handed down last September.
Sokola was a 16-year-old model and beauty pageant winner from Poland, newly arrived to New York in 2002, when an events promoter introduced her to Weinstein at a downtown Manhattan restaurant, Lucey said. The criminal charge is for an assault on Sokola that occurred four years later in a Manhattan hotel room, Lucey said. But during their first meeting in 2002, Weinstein asked her if she wanted to be in movies and invited Sokola to dinner a few days later, only to have his driver drop her at an apartment believed to be his downtown loft, Lucey said.
There, he persuaded the teen-ager to take off her top, telling her, “This is what happens in the industry,” and steered her to a bathroom where he masturbated while groping her, Lucey said. Afterwards, he told her “See? It wasn’t so bad,” and then, “You have to work on your stubbornness,” Lucey told jurors.
Harvey Weinstein’s defense lawyer, Arthur Aidala, didn’t challenge that story directly in his opening statement to the jury, but he described Sokola as a “troubled” young woman. The prosecution had already described her history of alcohol abuse and eating disorders. Sokola currently lives in Manhattan and has a child, the prosecutor said.
Aidala said all three of Weinstein’s accusers in the retrial, including returning witnesses Haley and Jessica Mann, engaged in consensual sex with his client and maintained years-long, mutually beneficial relationships with the famed producer.
“He gets them auditions, he gets them jobs and in return they fool around with him,” Aidala said. When their hoped-for careers in the industry didn’t pan out, the women turned on him, casting themselves as his victims amid a flurry of published revelations in 2017 about Weinstein’s treatment of women that gave rise to the #MeToo movement, Aidala said.
They also took settlement money through an insurer. Aidala said there are “four million reasons” to question the accusers’ motivations for coming forward, referencing what he described as the total payout to the women. Aidala said that some of Weinstein’s alleged victims went as fast as they could to “money lawyers.” In that category, he named Gloria Allred, who represented Haley and was seated at the back of the courtroom on Wednesday.
Aidala, who has clashed with Allred in and out of courtrooms, acknowledged her presence on Wednesday with a wave and a few friendly words, but accused her client, Haley, of lying under oath in the 2020 trial when she testified that she had no plans to sue him.
Weinstein, whose health has deteriorated since his legal troubles began, is spending his time outside the courthouse under guard at Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital — a reprieve from the city’s notoriously harsh and dysfunctional Rikers Island jail granted by Judge Farber during jury selection.
Despite the overturning of his New York 2020 sex crimes and sentence in 2024, Weinstein remains in custody because of his separate rape and assault conviction in Los Angeles, which he’s appealing.