Prosecutors requested for a September retrial for Harvey Weinstein throughout a listening to Wednesday in Manhattan, the disgraced film mogul’s first court docket look since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals court docket final week.
One of Weinstein’s accusers, Jessica Mann, is ready to testify once more, prosecutor Nicole Blumberg advised the decide, suggesting locking in a date after Labour Day.
Blumberg famous Mann was within the courtroom Wednesday, and mentioned she needs everybody to know that the defendant “may have power” however “she has the truth.”
“We believe in this case and will be retrying this case,” she mentioned.
Weinstein, sporting a navy blue swimsuit, was seated in a wheelchair on the preliminary listening to. The 72-year-old, who has cardiac points and diabetes, has been in a hospital since his return to town jail system Friday from an upstate jail.
Harvey Weinstein seems at Manhattan legal court docket for a preliminary listening to on Wednesday, May 1, 2024 in New York. Weinstein made first look since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals court docket final week.
(David Dee Delgado/Pool Photo through AP
In court docket, his legal professional, Arthur Aidala, mentioned he has no concern about his consumer’s psychological talents, describing Weinstein as “sharp as a tack. As sharp as he ever was.”
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Aidala mentioned his consumer needs to show his innocence: “It’s a new trial. It’s a new day.”
In the New York case that’s now overturned, Weinstein was convicted of rape within the third diploma for an assault on aspiring actor Mann in 2013, and of forcing himself on a TV and movie manufacturing assistant, Mimi Haley, in 2006. Weinstein had pleaded not responsible and maintained any sexual exercise was consensual.
The Associated Press doesn’t usually establish individuals alleging sexual assault until they consent to be named, as Haley and Mann have.
Speaking after the listening to, Haley’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, mentioned her consumer nonetheless hasn’t determined whether or not she needs to testify on the retrial, noting that doing so on the unique trial was traumatizing and painful. Haley was not in court docket Wednesday, Allred mentioned.
Weinstein was additionally convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of one other rape and continues to be sentenced to a different 16 years in jail in California.
But he stays in custody in New York, and can head again to Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, the place he’s anticipated to stay till his trial, Aidala mentioned.
“He’s in constant pain that he’s fighting through. He’s fighting the best he can,” the legal professional mentioned, including that he has however been studying avidly behind bars, together with biographies on Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt.
FILE – Former movie producer Harvey Weinstein seems in court docket on the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in Los Angeles, Calif., on Tuesday, Oct. 4 2022.
Etienne Laurent / Pool Photo through AP, File)
“Harvey Weinstein was used to drinking champagne and eating caviar and now he’s at the commissary paying for potato chips and M&Ms” however is making one of the best of it, Aidala mentioned.
On Thursday, the New York Court of Appeals vacated his conviction in a 4-3 determination, erasing his 23-year jail sentence, after concluding a trial decide permitted jurors to see and listen to an excessive amount of proof circuitously associated to what he was charged with.
The ruling shocked and disillusioned girls who celebrated historic beneficial properties in the course of the period of #MeToo, a motion that ushered in a wave of sexual misconduct claims in Hollywood and past.
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