Hollywood Hollywood Mogul trial, Harvey Weinstein was launched Wednesday with Manhattan prosecutors sharing details of three accusers, one who has just joined the case.
Weinstein was back in court on Wednesday a year after the New York Court of Appeal rejected his conviction in 2020 – which won him a sentence of 23 years in prison – after determining that the court made up for women to testify to the alleged violence of Weinstein even if they were not part of the charges.
“We hope that Mr. Weinstein will get a fair trial this time,” one of his lawyers, Imran Ansari, outside the courtroom, added that Weinstein, who denies all the allegations, was “determined to try to erase his name”.
A jury will once again hear the two women whom he has already been found guilty of attacking: Miriam Haley, a former “project track” assistant who declared that Weinstein forced oral sex on her at her apartment in 2006, and Jessica Mann, an actress who accused Weinstein of violating her in a room of the Manhattan hotel in 2013.
Bloomberg via Getty Images
During the opening statements on Wednesday, Manhattan’s deputy prosecutor Shannon Lucey identified the new accuser in the case as Kaja Sokola, who was a 16 -year -old actress and a model recently arrived in New York from Poland when she declared that Weinstein in 2002.
The two stayed in professional contact, said Lucey, until 2006, when he invited a Sokola, then 19, to his Manhattan hotel room to watch the scripts and then carried out oral sex on her.
Wednesday marks the first time that Sokola was named. In court documents leading to the trial, it was only identified as the complaint of witness n ° 3. However, Sokola made public allegations against Weinstein in the 2019 civil lawsuit, claiming that he had touched his vagina in a hotel chamber at the age of 16. This complaint appointed Weinstein’s brother, Bob Weinstein, also producer, Disney and Miramax as defendants, saying that they had failed to supervise Weinstein and impose his sexual ease. She won $ 3 million in the case.
Lucey told these details during his opening declaration on Wednesday, saying that Weinstein told Sokola when the assault was finished: “You see, it was not so bad,” said journalists from the courtroom.
Axelle / Bauer-Griffin via Getty Images
Sokola, Haley and Mann are only three of the 80 women who accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct, including actors Ashley Judd, Rose McGowan and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Weinstein’s principal lawyer, Arthur Aidala, then made his declaration of opening, qualifying the women as liars who received payments from Weinstein.
“From this witness stand, there will be 4 million reasons to lie,” Aidala told the jury, according to reports from the courtroom. “It’s how much they took.”
Aidala described meetings as consensual and said that women were all in “mutually beneficial relations” with the Hollywood magnate.
Weinstein, who was translated to the court in a wheelchair, until recently awaiting trials to Rikers Island – a notorious New York prison complex that his lawyers once compared to “a gulag where prisoners are treated as animals”. He was transferred to Bellevue hospital last week after his legal team filed an emergency petition citing his sick health.
Weinstein simultaneously attracted a rape conviction in 2022 in Los Angeles for which he risks 16 years in prison.
