The judge presiding over the retrial of the film producer Harvey Weinstein declared a mistrial on Thursday regarding the final, unresolved rape charge, because the foreman of the jury refused to return to the deliberation room. Prosecutors intend to retry the charge, which will mean a third Manhattan trial for Mr. Weinstein. The judge set July 2 as the date for the next hearing.
“We are calling an end to your deliberation at this time,” the state supreme court justice, Curtis Farber, told the jury on Thursday. “Sometimes jury deliberations can become heated. I understand that this one was more heated than some others. But given that the contention reached such a degree, I am going to declare a mistrial on the one count.”
Shortly before, the judge had called the foreman of the jury into the courtroom and asked if the man was willing to continue deliberating with his fellow jurors the charge that was left unresolved yesterday.
On Wednesday, the jury rendered a split verdict on two counts of the three-count indictment brought against the film producer. It found Mr. Weinstein guilty of the charge relating to a former production assistant, Miriam Haley, who accused the film producer of forcibly performing oral sex on her in his Manhattan apartment in 2006, and not guilty on the charge relating to a former Polish model, Kaja Sokola, who also claimed the producer forced oral sex on her in a hotel room in Manhattan that same year. The third-degree rape accusation, regarding a once aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, had been left undecided.
“Are you willing to go in?” the judge asked the foreman on Thursday.
“No, I am sorry,” the foreman said.
On Wednesday, the foreman had come into the courtroom and told the judge he had been threatened by other jurors, saying they were pressuring him into changing his vote.
“I feel afraid inside there,” the juror told Judge Farber, according to a transcript of the conversation received by the Sun. “I can’t be inside there.”
He also told the judge and attorneys from both parties that two jurors had told him, “We’ll meet you outside,” a well-known street slogan that means they were challenging him to a fight.
The judge attempted to de-escalate the situation by sending the jury home in the hope that on Thursday morning, tempers would have cooled and they could continue discussing the rape charge. But it appeared that they had not.
The lead defense attorney, Arthur Aidala, had pleaded with the judge to declare a mistrial not just on the one count but on all three counts, based on what he viewed as an extraordinary case of jury misconduct.
“Mr. Weinstein’s position is that the court is not adequately protecting Mr. Weinstein’s rights,” the attorney said.
“Your job is making sure that this court is all fair,” the attorney went on. “You have to talk not just to the victims of this crime, but the perpetrators of this crime. Call the jurors in. Ask them … find out what happened. … Physical threats that were backed up. … They met him on the street.”
Mr. Aidala was telling the judge that the foreman had in fact been met on the street by these two jurors when he was going home on Wednesday.
But an assistant district attorney, Matthew Colangelo, disagreed with that claim and called Mr. Aidala’s statements a “mischaracterization of what the juror said.”
The intra-jury dispute, the prosecutor argued, was blown out of proportion. What Mr. Aidala had described as a physical threat had in fact only been a dispute about an angry look, the prosecutor said. When the judge had asked the juror if he was concerned for his safety, Mr. Colangelo reminded the court, the juror had told him that “someone looked mad when he left the bathroom,” and another juror said the juror “shouldn’t look mad.”
The foreman “described an uncomfortable interaction because he didn’t want to change his mind,” the prosecutor insisted.
Outside the courthouse, after everyone was released, the Sun spoke to one of the jurors, who would not give his name.
“We didn’t finish talking,” the man told the Sun, because the foreman “wasn’t open to changing his mind.” When asked about the threats of meeting the foreman outside, the juror laughed it off and said, “it was overblown,” and said no one met anyone on the street.
Inside the courthouse, however, the Sun overheard a different side of the story. A woman who had been on the jury was talking to the defense attorneys in the lobby and telling them that she agreed with the foreman. She did not want to talk to the press and was being shielded by a court officer, but she repeated numerous times that she “wanted to do the right thing” and honor the oath she had taken when she was sworn in as a juror, adding that she felt the foreman had done the “right thing.”
There seemed to be two factions in the jury. One side wanted to convict Mr. Weinstein of the rape charge, according to the man who spoke to the Sun outside; the other faction, which included the foreman and the woman talking to his defense attorneys, did not want to convict him.
In the courtroom, the judge told the attorneys that he had spoken to the jurors after he declared a mistrial and “they were extremely disappointed” that deliberations had ended. “They don’t understand why” the foreman bowed out.
After the judge called the mistrial, prosecutors said they wanted to retry the charge related to Ms. Mann and that “she is ready and willing and wants to retry this count.” The judge set a hearing on that charge for July 2.
Ms. Mann, who had a consensual, sexual relationship with Mr. Weinstein for five years, says that in 2013, after she refused his advances, he took her into a hotel room and raped her. Ms. Mann testified that she saw a needle in the garbage can of her hotel room’s bathroom, leading her to believe Mr. Weinstein injected himself with a drug to combat erectile dysfunction prior to the assault.
On Thursday, when the defense team addressed reporters outside the courthouse, Mr. Aidala said he would appeal the conviction on the charge relating to Ms. Haley, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, and said he was confident that the verdict would be overturned as it had been after the first trial.
Mr. Weinstein was convicted in 2020 of the charge brought by Ms. Haley and of the charge brought by Ms. Mann. The judge sentenced him to 23 years in prison. But last year, New York’s highest court, the court of appeals, overturned that conviction because it found that women had been allowed to testify during the trial about past allegations against Mr. Weinstein who had not been not part of the charged crimes.
Mr. Aidala believed that there was enough evidence to convince the appeals court to overturn the recent conviction again.
“We have very powerful evidence that there was gross juror misconduct at this trial. Very powerful evidence, not just relying on what we saw in the courtroom about a juror saying he was being so intimidated that he refused to go back in the deliberating room. None of us have ever heard of that. … A grown man, he is in good physical shape, in his late 30s, saying, ‘I am afraid to go back into the deliberating room.’ If that doesn’t cast doubt on the verdicts here, I don’t know what does.”
The attorney said the case was not finished: “This is not over.”
The next hearing for the unresolved count in the seemingly never-ending Weinstein saga is scheduled for July 2. Even if the New York cases ultimately result in exoneration, or a sentencing to time served (Mr. Weinstein, who has bone marrow cancer, diabetes, and fluid in his lungs, among other ailments, has been in prison about five years), he was also sentenced to another 16 years in Los Angeles for other sexual offenses. That case, too, is under appeal.
Mr. Aidala told reporters that “there is a vibrant appeal going on in California,” which another defense attorney, Jennifer Bonjean, is leading. “We’re very confident that that appeal will be successful,” he added.
There were no comments made in regard to the sentencing on the convicted count. It appears that sentencing will have to wait until the third-degree rape charge is decided by yet another jury.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
