Prosecutors requested a new September trial for Harvey Weinstein during a hearing Wednesday in Manhattan, the disgraced movie mogul’s first court appearance since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals court last week. .
One of Weinstein’s accusers, Jessica Mann, is prepared to testify again, prosecutor Nicole Blumberg told the judge, suggesting setting a date after Labor Day.
Blumberg noted that Mann was in the courtroom Wednesday and said he wants everyone to know that the defendant “may have power,” but “she has the truth.”
“We believe in this case and we will retry it,” he said.
Weinstein, dressed in a navy suit, was sitting in a wheelchair at the preliminary hearing. The 72-year-old, who has heart problems and diabetes, has been in a hospital since his return to the city’s prison system on Friday from an upstate prison.
Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan Criminal Court for a preliminary hearing on Wednesday, May 1, 2024, in New York. Weinstein made his first appearance since an appeals court overturned his 2020 rape conviction last week.
(David Dee Delgado/Pool Photo via AP
In court, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said he had no concerns about his client’s mental abilities and described Weinstein as “sharp as a tack.” As smart as ever.”
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Aidala said his client wants to prove his innocence: “It’s a new trial. It is a new day.”
In the New York case that has now been overturned, Weinstein was convicted of third-degree rape for an attack on aspiring actor Mann in 2013, and for forcing himself on a film and television production assistant, Mimi Haley, in 2006. Weinstein had pleaded not guilty and maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
The Associated Press generally does not identify people who allege sexual assault unless they consent to be identified, as Haley and Mann have done.
Speaking after the hearing, Haley’s attorney, Gloria Allred, said her client has not yet decided whether she wants to testify at the retrial, noting that doing so at the original trial was traumatizing and painful. Haley was not in court Wednesday, Allred said.
Weinstein was also convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 for another rape and is still sentenced to another 16 years in prison in California.
But he remains detained in New York and will return to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, where he is expected to remain until his trial, Aidala said.
“He is in constant pain and is fighting through it. “He’s fighting the best he can,” the lawyer said, adding that, however, he has been reading avidly behind bars, including biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt.
FILE – Former film producer Harvey Weinstein appears in court at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles, California, on Tuesday, October 4, 2022.
Etienne Laurent / Pool Photo via AP, File)
“Harvey Weinstein was used to drinking champagne and eating caviar and now he’s in the store paying for chips and M&Ms,” but he’s making the best of it, Aidala said.
On Thursday, the New York Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in a 4-3 decision, erasing his 23-year prison sentence, after concluding that a trial judge allowed jurors to see and hear too much evidence that they did not They were directly related to the charges against him. .
The ruling shocked and disappointed women who celebrated historic achievements during the #MeToo era, a movement that ushered in a wave of sexual misconduct allegations in Hollywood and beyond.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
