Harvey Weinstein: Key moments in the Los Angeles trial of the disgraced film producer
Harvey Weinstein had been charged with raping and sexually assaulting two women and committing sexual battery against two others.
After a month of evidence from 44 witnesses in Los Angeles, a jury has found Weinstein guilty of one count of rape.
He was found not guilty of sexual battery by restraint of another woman.
The jury was also unable to reach verdicts on allegations linked to two other women.
Currently two years into a 23-year sentence for previous convictions on rape and sexual assault charges in New York, Weinstein was held in jail throughout his latest trial.
The Los Angeles trial was widely viewed as symbolic – but it assumed greater significance in light of the producer being granted permission to appeal against his New York convictions.
The 70-year-old was charged with crimes against four of the witnesses who testified.
Three of the women – a model, a model/actress, and a massage therapist – gave evidence anonymously.
Filmmaker Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California governor Gavin Newsom, waived her right to anonymity.
The jury were unable to reach verdicts on charges relating to Newsom.
Four other women who are not involved with the charges also told the court that Weinstein sexually assaulted them.
Here are the key moments from the trial:
The defence
Weinstein’s lawyer told the trial that the prosecution case relied entirely on asking them to trust women whose evidence showed they were untrustworthy.
In his closing arguments, Alan Jackson said: “‘Take my word for it’. Five words that sum up the entirety of the prosecution’s case.”
Weinstein’s lawyer Alan Jackson argued the prosecution case was ‘smoke and mirrors’. Pic: AP
Everything else prosecutors presented “was smoke and mirrors”, he argued.
Mr Jackson urged jurors to look past the drama and emotion of the testimony of the four women, and focus on the factual evidence.
He said jurors were being asked to “believe us because we’re mad, believe us because we cried”, adding: “Well fury does not make fact. And tears do not make truth.”
Mr Jackson said the stories of two women who Weinstein was alleged to have sexually assaulted on consecutive days in 2013 “simply never happened”.
The defence lawyer also said the alleged rape and assault of the other two women in 2005 and 2010 were “100% consensual” encounters that the women engaged in for the sake of career advancement that they later became “desperate to relabel” as non-consensual.
“These were women with whom Harvey had transactional relationships and transactional sex,” he said.
Mr Jackson argued that the women were willing to exchange sex for favours or status when the incidents happened in 2005 and 2010, but after the #MeToo explosion around Weinstein with stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker in 2017, they were regretful.
“They played the game. They hate it now, unequivocally,” he said. “But what about then? What about before the 2017 dogpile started on Mr Weinstein?”
He stressed the importance of the judge’s instruction, that if jurors found any significant thing a witness said was untrue, they should consider disbelieving everything the witness said.
The prosecution
Prosecutors, closing their case, branded Weinstein a “predator” and a “degenerate rapist”.
Deputy district attorney Marlene Martinez emphasised the similarities between his accusers’ testimony.
“They all describe the same conduct by the same man,” she said.
After arranging to meet with a woman at a hotel he would find a way to get them to his suite where he would then go from “charming and complimentary to aggressive and demanding”.
Ms Martinez said: “For this predator, hotels were his trap.
“Confined within those walls, victims were not able to run from his hulking mass.
“People were not able to hear their screams, they were not able to see them cower.”
She urged jurors to complete Weinstein’s fall from grace by convicting him in California.
She said: “It is time for the defendant’s reign of terror to end.
“It is time for the kingmaker to be brought to justice.”
Prosecutors branded Weinstein a ‘predator’ and a ‘degenerate rapist’
‘I was kind of hysterical through tears’
The first of Weinstein’s accusers, a model and actress who was in LA for a film festival at the time she was raped by the producer in 2013, told the court he knocked on her hotel room door and she let him in.
She said Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on her hotel bed. “I was kind of hysterical through tears,” she said. “I kept saying ‘no, no, no’.”
She said she physically feared Weinstein, who outweighed her by 100 pounds or more, and considered running or hitting or biting him.
She said by the time Weinstein took her into the bathroom to rape her, she had stopped physically resisting, though still objected verbally. “I would just freeze, like my body wouldn’t listen.”
He was found guilty of three counts, including rape.
Woman testifies for second time
Just one woman who gave evidence during the New York trial has testified in LA. The model, who was aspiring to be a screenwriter, had set up a meeting with Weinstein about a script she was working on in 2013, the court heard.
She described Weinstein as a “monster”, and said he led her into a bathroom, quickly took off his suit and got briefly in the shower, then stepped out and blocked her from leaving.
“I was disgusted,” she said. “I had never seen a big guy like that naked.”
She said she backed up against a sink and turned away from him. He then unzipped her dress and groped her with one hand as he masturbated with the other, the court heard.
The jury did not reach a verdict on this count.
Masseuse tells court ‘I was in shock’
A massage therapist accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her in 2010, when she was 28, after he hired her to go to his hotel room for a treatment.
When she was in the bathroom washing her hands following the massage, she said Weinstein entered, blocked the door, and began masturbating in front of her.
She began to cry as she told the court: “I was terrified.” Weinstein blocked the door and pushed her against a wall and groped her breasts before finishing, the court heard.
“I was in shock. I felt frozen, I felt paralysed,” she said.
The jury found Weinstein not guilty of sexual battery.
Filmmaker cries as she tells of alleged rape
Jennifer Siebel Newsom. Pic: AP
In an emotional testimony, Ms Siebel Newsom, 48, told the court she was 31 when she was allegedly attacked by Weinstein during what she thought was a business meeting to try to build her career in 2005.
Spending two-and-a-half hours on the witness stand, she was in tears as she told the court she found herself unexpectedly alone with the Hollywood mogul in a hotel suite.
Asked to describe her feelings after Weinstein allegedly emerged from the bathroom in a robe and began groping her while he masturbated, she said: “Horror! Horror! I’m trembling. I’m like a rock, I’m frigid. This is my worst nightmare.”
Ms Siebel Newsom said she told Weinstein that “this was not why I came here” as she physically tried to back away.
The jury did not reach verdicts on these counts.
Entertainment
Stalker who believed Strictly Come Dancing judge Shirley Ballas was his aunt avoids jail
A man who stalked Strictly Come Dancing judge Shirley Ballas for six years has avoided jail.
Kyle Shaw, 37, got a 20-month suspended sentence and a lifetime restraining order on contacting Ballas, her mother, niece, and former partner.
Liverpool Crown Court heard that he thought Ballas was his aunt and “began a persistent campaign of contact”.
“He believed, and it’s evident from what he was told by his mother, that her late brother was his father,” said prosecutor Nicola Daley.
The court heard there was no evidence he was wrong, and “limited evidence” he was correct.
Ms Daley said Shaw’s messages had accused Ballas of being to blame for the death of her brother, who took his own life in 2003 aged 44.
He also set up social media accounts in his name.
Shaw had pleaded guilty to stalking the former dancer between August 2017 and November 2023 at a hearing in February.
Incidents included following Ballas’s 86-year-old mother, Audrey Rich, while she was shopping and telling her she was his grandmother.
The court heard in messages to Mrs Rich, Shaw had asked: “Where’s my dad?”
Ballas was so worried for her mother’s safety that she moved her from Merseyside to London.
Kyle Shaw outside court on the day of his sentencing. Pic: PA
In October 2020, Ballas called police after Shaw messaged her and said: “Do you want me to kill myself, Shirley?”
Posts on X included one alongside an image of her home address that warned: “You ruined my life, I’ll ruin yours and everyone’s around you.”
Another referenced a book signing and said: “I can’t wait to meet you for the first time Aunty Shirley. Hopefully I can get an autograph.”
The court was told Ballas’s niece Mary Assall, former partner Daniel Taylor and colleagues from Strictly Come Dancing and ITV’s Loose Women were also sent messages.
‘I know where you live’
On one occasion in late 2023, Shaw called Mr Taylor and told him he knew where the couple lived and described Ballas’s movements.
The court heard the 64-year-old TV star become wary of socialising and stopped using public transport.
Prosecutor Ms Daley said: “She described having sleepless nights worrying about herself and her family’s safety and being particularly distressed when suggestions were made to her that she and her mother were responsible for her brother taking his own life.”
Ballas has been head judge on Strictly Come Dancing since 2017. Pic: PA
Shaw cried and wiped away tears as he was sentenced on Tuesday.
The judge said the stalking stemmed from his mother telling him Ballas’s brother, David Rich, was his biological father.
“I’m satisfied that your motive for this offending was a desire to seek contact with people you genuinely believed were your family,” he said.
“Whether in fact there’s any truth in that belief is difficult, if not impossible, to determine.”
Shaw pictured at court in February. Pic: PA
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Defence lawyer John Weate said Shaw had been told the story by his mother “in his mid to late teens” and had suffered “complex mental health issues” since he was a child.
He added: “He now accepts that Miss Ballas and her family don’t wish to have any contact with him and, importantly, he volunteered the information that he has no intention of contacting them again.”
Shaw, of Whetstone Lane in Birkenhead, also admitted possessing cannabis and was ordered to undertake a rehab programme.
Gary Glitter has been made bankrupt after failing to pay more than £500,000 in damages to a woman he abused when she was 12 years old.
She sued the disgraced singer, whose real name is Paul Gadd, after he was found guilty of attacking her and two other schoolgirls between 1975 and 1980.
Glitter, 80, was jailed for 16 years in 2015 and released in 2023 but was recalled to prison less than six weeks later after breaching his parole conditions.
A judge awarded the woman £508,800, including £381,000 in lost earnings and £7,800 for future therapy and treatment, saying she was subjected to abuse “of the most serious kind”.
The court heard she had not worked for decades due to the trauma of being repeatedly raped and “humiliated” by the singer.
Glitter was jailed for 16 years in 2015. Pic: Met Police/PA
Glitter was made bankrupt last month at the County Court at Torquay and Newton Abbot, in Devon – the county where he is reportedly serving his sentence in Channings Wood prison, in Newton Abbot.
Richard Scorer, head of abuse law at Slater and Gordon, the law firm representing the woman, said: “We confirm that Gadd has been made bankrupt following our client’s application.
“As he has done throughout, Gadd has refused to cooperate with the process and continues to treat his victims with contempt.
“We hope and trust that the parole board will take his behaviour into account in any future parole applications, as it clearly demonstrates that he has never changed, shows no remorse and remains a serious risk to the public.”
Glitter was first jailed for four months in 1999 after he admitted possessing around 4,000 indecent images of children.
He was expelled from Cambodia in 2002, and in March 2006 was convicted of sexually abusing two girls, aged 10 and 11, in Vietnam where he spent two-and-a-half years in prison.
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His sentence for the 2016 convictions expires in February 2031.
Glitter was automatically released from HMP The Verne, a low-security prison in Portland, Dorset, in February 2023 after serving half of his fixed-term determinate sentence.
But he was back behind bars weeks later after reportedly trying to access the dark web and images of children.
Paul Mescal and Barry Keoghan will play Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr in the upcoming Beatles films – with a Stranger Things star also portraying one of the Fab Four.
The two Irish actors will be joined by London-born performers Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.
The cast for the Sam Mendes project was revealed at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, with all four appearing on stage and taking a bow together in Beatles style.
(L-R) Mescal, Quinn, Keoghan and Dickinson appeared together at the announcement. Pic: Reuters
Mendes is making four interconnected films – one from the perspective of each of the band members – and they are all set to be released “in proximity” to each other in April 2028.
It marks the first time The Beatles and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison have granted full life story and music rights for a scripted film.
Playing McCartney is another big role for 29-year-old Mescal, who recently starred in the Gladiator sequel and was nominated for an Oscar in 2023 for Aftersun.
Barry Keoghan – who also got an Oscar nod for The Banshees of Inisherin – will portray the other surviving Beatles member, Ringo Starr.
Pic: PA
Meanwhile, Stranger Things star Joseph Quinn, who appeared with long hair as Eddie Munson in the fourth series, takes up the role of George Harrison.
Harris Dickinson has the challenge of stepping into the shoes of perhaps the most famous Beatle, John Lennon.
The 28-year-old recently starred in erotic thriller Babygirl with Nicole Kidman and also appeared in satire Triangle of Sadness.
Mendes told the industry audience at CinemaCon there is “still plenty to explore” despite the Beatles’ rise having being well chronicled.
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The Oscar-winning British director is known for films including American Beauty, First World War movie 1917, and Bond outings Skyfall and Spectre.
Sony Pictures boss Tom Rothman said the close release of all four films in three years’ time will be “the first bingeable theatrical experience”.
“We are going to dominate the culture that month,” he added.
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