LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County prosecutors will not seek to retry Harvey Weinstein in the sexual assault of two women, including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, after a jury hung on those charges last year, prosecutors announced Tuesday.
After a two-month trial, in which he was accused of raping four women in hotels between 2004 and 2013, Weinstein was convicted in December of sexually assaulting an Italian model and actress following a film festival in Beverly Hills.
Jurors acquitted Weinstein of assaulting a massage therapist and deadlocked on charges that he assaulted Lauren Young — a former actress who also testified against him in New York — and Siebel Newsom, who was an up-and-coming actress when she alleged he attacked her in a hotel room in the mid-2000s.
The Times normally does not identify victims of sexual assault, but Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Young have either testified against Weinstein in public court settings before or identified themselves in media accounts.
Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in a California prison last month. Combined with the 23-year sentence he received after being convicted of rape in New York in 2020, the disgraced Hollywood mogul, who is 70 and in poor health, is all but assured to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Young appeared in court Tuesday and asked prosecutors to retry her case. Siebel Newsom, however, submitted a written statement asking the district attorney’s office not to pursue a second trial on her allegation.
“The First Partner’s primary intention in coming forward was to ensure that Weinstein spends the rest of his life in prison. While the jury could not reach a verdict on the charges relating to her experience, we believe that her testimony, in chorus with the other brave victims’ testimonies, led to Weinstein’s conviction and the 16-year sentence he faces in California after he serves his New York sentence,” her attorney, Elizabeth Fegan, said in a statement.
“Had the court not handed down a fitting sentence,” Fegan said, “my client would have been ready to support the prosecutors if they opted to retry Weinstein, even considering the enormous emotional toll it would inflict on her.”
Deputy District Attorney Paul Thompson, the lead prosecutor on the case, said Weinstein would have only faced an additional year in prison if convicted of the count related to Young’s allegation.
Weinstein will now be returned to custody in New York, where he is still appealing his conviction, according to his attorney, Mark Werksman.
Juda Engelmayer, Weinstein’s spokesman, called the prosecutors’ decision Tuesday “an important step toward Harvey Weinstein’s appeal in L.A.”
“Now, he and his team can focus on Jane Doe 1’s claims alone, of which there is ample support and proof that corroborates Harvey’s claims that it never happened,” Engelmayer wrote in an e-mail.
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