It’s still 1940 in a courtroom in downtown Los Angeles, where a “bimbo” who supposedly tried to get ahead by sleeping with a big-time Hollywood movie producer is turning on the waterworks.
I say this because unfortunately, nothing about Harvey Weinstein defense attorney Mark Werksman’s cross-examination of California’s first partner, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, has been updated in the years since we all thought that only liars recalled traumatic events imperfectly. Now we know that it’s actually the liars whose stories are tidy and perfectly groomed. They never vary, because they are scripted from the start.
But in the retro world of rape prosecutions, the defense never varies, either. So of course Werksman suggested that it’s highly suspicious that Gov. Gavin Newsom’s wife, whom the defense attorney called a “bimbo” in his opening argument, has remembered more about the night in 2005 when she says Weinstein raped her than she did when she first talked to police about it.
