Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been found guilty of the rape and sexual assault of an Italian actress and model after a month-long trial.
The three guilty counts came against just one of his four accusers, known in court as Jane Doe 1, after Weinstein was extradited from New York to Los Angeles to face sex-related charges.
Weinstein, 70, who is two years into a 23-year sentence for a rape and sexual assault conviction in New York that is under appeal, could get up to 24 years in prison in California when he is sentenced.
Most of the women said their assaults began with what were supposed to be business meetings with Weinstein at hotels.
He was found guilty of rape, forced oral copulation and another sexual misconduct count involving the woman who said he appeared uninvited at her hotel room door during a Los Angeles film festival in 2013.
“Harvey Weinstein forever destroyed a part of me that night in 2013 and I will never get that back. The criminal trial was brutal and Weinstein’s lawyers put me through hell on the witness stand, but I knew I had to see this through to the end, and I did,” the woman said in a statement after the verdict.
“I hope Weinstein never sees the outside of a prison cell during his lifetime.”
Weinstein was acquitted of a sexual battery allegation made by a massage therapist who treated him at a hotel in 2010.
The jury was unable to reach a decision on counts involving two accusers, notably rape and sexual assault charges involving Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. A mistrial was declared on those counts.
Weinstein looked down at the table and appeared to put his face in his hands when the initial guilty counts were read.
“Harvey is obviously disappointed in the verdict. He knows what happened and what never did,” Weinstein’s spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said adding there was a strong basis for an appeal on the convictions.
“Harvey is grateful for the jury’s work on the other counts, and he’s determined to continue his legal challenges in ultimately proving his innocence.”
District Attorney George Gascón applauded the accusers for their bravery to testify in the case, saying in a statement he was disappointed by the split verdict but hoped it brings “some measure of justice to the victims”.
“Harvey Weinstein will never be able to rape another woman. He will spend the rest of his life behind bars where he belongs,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement.
“Throughout the trial, Weinstein’s lawyers used sexism, misogyny, and bullying tactics to intimidate, demean, and ridicule us survivors. The trial was a stark reminder that we as a society have work to do.”
Defense attorneys said during the trial that if Siebel Newsom hadn’t reached her later prominence she would be “just another bimbo who slept with Harvey Weinstein to get ahead in Hollywood.”
“Regret is not the same thing as rape,” Weinstein attorney Alan Jackson said in his closing argument.
He urged jurors to look past the women’s emotional testimony and focus on the factual evidence.
“‘Believe us because we’re mad, believe us because we cried,’” Jackson said jurors were being asked to do. “Well, fury does not make fact. And tears do not make truth.”
The women’s accounts echoed the allegations of dozens of others who have emerged since Weinstein became a #MeToo lightning rod starting with stories in the New York Times in 2017.
A movie about that reporting, “She Said,” was released during the trial, and jurors were repeatedly warned not to see it.
