Prosecutors requested for a September retrial for Harvey Weinstein throughout a listening to Wednesday in Manhattan, the disgraced film mogul’s first courtroom look since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals courtroom final week.
One among Weinstein’s accusers, Jessica Mann, is ready to testify once more, prosecutor Nicole Blumberg informed the decide, suggesting locking in a date after Labour Day.
Blumberg famous Mann was within the courtroom Wednesday, and stated she needs everybody to know that the defendant “might have energy” however “she has the reality.”
“We imagine on this case and might be retrying this case,” she stated.
Weinstein, sporting a navy blue go well with, 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 the town jail system Friday from an upstate jail.
Harvey Weinstein seems at Manhattan prison courtroom for a preliminary listening to on Wednesday, Could 1, 2024 in New York. Weinstein made first look since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals courtroom final week.
(David Dee Delgado/Pool Photograph through AP
In courtroom, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, stated he has no concern about his consumer’s psychological talents, describing Weinstein as “sharp as a tack. As sharp as he ever was.”
Aidala stated his consumer needs to show his innocence: “It’s a brand new trial. It’s a brand new day.”
Within 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 Related Press doesn’t typically determine folks alleging sexual assault until they consent to be named, as Haley and Mann have.
Talking after the listening to, Haley’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, stated her consumer nonetheless hasn’t determined whether or not she needs to testify on the retrial, noting that doing so on the authentic trial was traumatizing and painful. Haley was not in courtroom Wednesday, Allred stated.
Weinstein was additionally convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of one other rape and remains to be sentenced to a different 16 years in jail in California.
However 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 stated.
“He’s in fixed ache that he’s combating via. He’s combating one of the best he can,” the lawyer stated, including that he has nonetheless been studying avidly behind bars, together with biographies on Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt.
FILE – Former movie producer Harvey Weinstein seems in courtroom on the Clara Shortridge Foltz Legal Justice Heart in Los Angeles, Calif., on Tuesday, Oct. 4 2022.
Etienne Laurent / Pool Photograph through AP, File)
“Harvey Weinstein was used to consuming champagne and consuming caviar and now he’s on the commissary paying for potato chips and M&Ms” however is making one of the best of it, Aidala stated.
On Thursday, the New York Courtroom of Appeals vacated his conviction in a 4-3 resolution, 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 dissatisfied ladies who celebrated historic positive factors 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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