Jurors at Harvey Weinstein‘s rape retrial in New York City heard corroborating testimony this morning about a 2006 sexual assault by the Oscar wining producer, As well the courtroom 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.
The famed producer’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.
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 women and five men 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.
Weinstein’s defense lawyer, Arthur Aidala, didn’t challenge that story directly in his opening statement to the seven-woman, five-man jury (plus six alternates), 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.
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