In 2011, Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s documentary Miss Representation, about sexist stereotypes in Hollywood, debuted at Sundance. The film, which would be screened at schools across the country, referenced her own frustrations as an aspiring actor, and asked famous women and teenage girls to grapple with how the media sexualized women and reduced their value to their bodies.
A decade later, Siebel Newsom would tell prosecutors about one of the experiences that inspired the documentary: during what she thought was a business meeting with Harvey Weinstein in 2005, she alleges, the producer suddenly reappeared naked except for a robe, tried to grope her despite her protests, and then raped her.
At Weinstein’s second rape and sexual assault trial – now under way in Los Angeles – the disgraced producer’s defense attorneys went after Siebel Newsom in their opening statement. They called the film-maker, who has made sexual stereotypes and sexual violence central themes of her work, “just another bimbo who slept with Harvey Weinstein to get ahead in Hollywood”.
The same grotesque stereotypes that she had spent years fighting were once again being used against her.
Siebel Newsom, 48, has directed four documentaries about gender inequities in the US, most recently the 2022 film Fair Play, an adaptation of a bestselling book about how women continue to shoulder a disproportionate burden of domestic and care work. She has done this while juggling her role as a high-profile political spouse to Gavin Newsom, a Democratic power player who rose from mayor of San Francisco to California governor, and is widely understood to be contemplating a run for president.
Thank you, California!! pic.twitter.com/bmjFRahClx
— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) November 9, 2022
Siebel Newsom’s documentaries have not made her a household name, but women who have worked closely with her over the years described her as dedicated, generous, and quick to mobilize her top-tier political connections to help advocates.
On 8 November, Siebel Newsom, smiling and perfectly coiffed, was standing behind her husband, with their four children, in Sacramento, as Newsom celebrated his re-election as governor, an easy victory that came after Newsom had withstood a harder-fought recall campaign organized by Republicans and other critics of his Covid-19 policies.
Six days later, she was in a criminal courtroom in Los Angeles, testifying in graphic detail about her memories of her alleged rape when she was a young actor trying to build an onscreen career and to produce her own films, and had accepted an invitation to meet Weinstein at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for what she thought would be a networking conversation.
Siebel Newsom broke down, sometimes sobbing on the stand: for years she tried to avoid thinking about what had happened to her, and it had taken a long time to tell her husband and close friends about it. First the prosecutors, and then Weinstein’s defense attorneys, asked her to describe exactly what had happened at each stage of the incident: where her body was, what she had done with her hands, precisely what sounds she did and didn’t make.
Judge Lisa Lench made clear that Siebel Newsom’s husband, as the state’s governor, could not be present in the courtroom as she testified.
Weinstein’s defense team is arguing that some of Weinstein’s accusers simply made up their assaults, and that others, including Siebel Newsom, once had sex with him willingly in order to advance their careers, and only re-characterized their encounters as violent after the rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017.
More than 90 women have spoke out publicly about Weinstein’s sexual misconduct, including powerful Hollywood stars like Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie and Ashley Judd, but most of the women who testified in criminal trials have not been particularly famous or well connected. Siebel Newsom is the most prominent woman so far to testify in court.
On Tuesday, she faced hours of grueling cross-examination, with Weinstein’s defense attorney Mark Werksman first hammering on details of her story, trying to cast doubt on her memory and what had changed in her account over time. He then spent hours reading aloud dozens of friendly professional emails she had sent Weinstein in the months and years after the alleged assault – emails that Siebel Newsom testified she largely had not remembered sending.
In question after question, Werksman switched rapidly between different angles of attack. He presented Siebel Newsom as a Hollywood mean girl, who had described Weinstein as weird and gross, while simultaneously sending him cordial business emails that said she had enjoyed seeing him. He painted her as a drama queen and a liar, contrasting Siebel Newsom’s testimony that she had been distressed and afraid when she ran into Weinstein in the years after the attack with emails in which she sought his advice and asked him for business meetings.
Werksman also tried to portray her as a ditz, accusing her of not knowing the difference between “dissociate” and “disassociate”, and demanding that she spell the word aloud for him in the courtroom. Lench intervened and said she could simply repeat what she had said.
“To see Weinstein’s defense team roll out some of the very practices that she has fought against underscores how much more work we must do,” Beth Fegan, Siebel Newsom’s attorney, said in a statement.
Werksman did not respond to requests for comment about his courtroom tactics.
Siebel Newsom, who appeared tired but mostly composed during the cross-examination, often pushed back. When Werksman suggested that when she testified she dissociated when writing warm business emails to Weinstein, she meant a Hollywood habit of saying one thing and meaning another, she corrected him: “No, I think it’s trauma, actually.”
When he kept demanding she be more specific about sounds she made during Weinstein’s alleged assault, she told him, “This is not When Harry Met Sally – I’m not doing that.”
Siebel Newsom has written previously that Weinstein was not the only man who targeted her, and that she was also “violated” by a national soccer team coach during her years as a young athlete.
For the people who have worked with Siebel Newsom for years on her documentaries and advocacy work, the attacks she and the other accusers have faced during the Los Angeles trial have been painful, but not surprising, said Caroline Heldman, an Occidental College professor who serves as the executive director of a non-profit Siebel Newsom founded.
What has stood out to Siebel Newsom’s colleagues as they have discussed the trial is “that the old victim-shaming playbook is still being used”, Heldman wrote in an email.
“The way the defense used their position, not just re-traumatize the victims, but pulling out all of the different traps to stereotype, ridicule, mock and shame these women, was appalling.”
Susan Estrich, the feminist legal scholar who coined the phrase “the nuts and sluts defense” to describe the most common ways defense lawyers in rape cases demeaned women, said the current Weinstein trial defense rhetoric seemed “a bit out of the 1980s playbook”.
Weinstein is serving 23 years in prison after being convicted on two out of five sexual assault and rape charges in a criminal trial in New York. New York’s highest court granted his legal team an appeal in that case, but decades of prison time loom if he is convicted on the seven charges he is facing in Los Angeles.
“It may be, since he’s going to prison for a long time, they decided to go for broke,” said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford law professor who has followed the trials, and Weinstein’s defense team may be hoping that these attacks “would work better in Los Angeles” as a “more cynical place about the transactional relationships among people” in Hollywood.
But other advocates said the tactics of Weinstein’s second criminal trial were a sad sign of how little had changed for survivors of sexual assault, even as a triumphant Hollywood adaptation of the New York Times’ investigation of Weinstein is playing in movie theaters across the country.
Wendy Murphy, a former sex crimes prosecutor who teachers a course on sexual assault and legal reforms at New England Law, said that the trial rhetoric was another sign of the limits of the #MeToo movement.
“If we had reached the point where we had made systemic reforms, the word ‘bimbo’ would never come out of the mouth of an attorney,” she said.
“#MeToo raised awareness about the horrors of sexual violence, but it has done little to reduce sexual violence or make it safer for survivors to come forward,” Murphy wrote.
Heldman, the executive director of the Representation Project, the non-profit Newsom founded to support the advocacy work of her films on gender stereotypes, said, “Successful social movements both raise awareness of a problem and institute mechanisms of accountability to address it, so the #MeToo Movement has a long way to go.”
Whatever the outcome of the Weinstein trial, former colleagues said, Newsom deserves praise for her difficult decision to testify, and for her years of quiet, behind-the-scenes work to change national policy about how survivors of rape and sexual assault are treated.
She was an executive producer on Invisible War, the Oscar-nominated 2012 documentary about the US military’s failure to deal with rape and sexual assault within its ranks. Siebel Newsom and her producing partner secured funding for the documentary when no one else would touch it, Amy Ziering, one of the film’s producers, said. This was in 2010, long before the #MeToo movement took off, she added, and they had been told, “No one wants to hear stories about women being raped and no one wants to hear stories about women being raped in the military.”
Once Invisible War debuted, Siebel Newsom used a meeting with the defense secretary, Leon Panetta, to make sure he personally saw the film, which led him to change the policy on how the US military handled sexual assault allegations, Ziering said.
Later, when Ziering produced The Hunting Ground, a documentary about the prevalence of sexual assault on college campuses, Siebel Newsom got her on the phone with the then-secretary of education, Arne Duncan.
“She’s the real deal,” Ziering said.
