In Manhattan Supreme Court docket on April 22.
Picture: Steven Hirsch/Pool
Harvey Weinstein?” the court-information officer repeated blankly after I requested for instructions one morning — as if to say, “Are you certain?” Weinstein’s third New York trial had begun in Manhattan prison courtroom every week earlier with out leaving a lot of an impression, even on the courthouse. There have been no strains and few information cameras; much more folks had been tenting outdoors the federal courthouse a couple of blocks away, the place a soldier was pleading not responsible to utilizing confidential data to guess on the ouster of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Surveying the empty pews within the room, I questioned if I used to be within the fallacious place. Two seasoned courtroom watchers assured me I wasn’t. (“Did I meet you at Diddy?” one requested.) When the once-feared mogul — now close-shaven and pale — was wheeled in from Rikers, there have been fewer than ten spectators within the courtroom. Just a few extra trickled in as testimony started.
Weinstein was the Ur-villain of the Me Too second, the one everybody was purported to agree on. The reporters who broke the tales about him shared a Pulitzer Prize; the ladies who put themselves on the road had been named Time’s Particular person of the 12 months; actresses launched Time’s Up and linked arms with activists on the Oscars. The primary Weinstein trial, in early 2020, was a veritable circus — celebrities held courtroom and a flash mob chanted bilingual slogans in formation.
It’s been an extended six years. In 2024, Weinstein satisfied New York’s highest courtroom that he’d been handled unfairly by prosecutors. He gained a brand new trial, and a yr later, when jurors couldn’t attain a call on a rape cost, a decide ordered a 3rd trial, this one. Weinstein nonetheless has no recognized defenders who will not be on his payroll. However as his prison circumstances have made their manner by the system, a lot of the world has subtly shifted again in his favor. At minimal, many have moved on.
Jessica Mann has refused to. In courtroom, I watched the previous actress testify, in entrance of Weinstein and thru sobs, that he had raped her on the DoubleTree lodge in 2013. The case wouldn’t exist with out cultural tailwinds. However the ensuing blowback has trapped Mann in a twisted Groundhog Day state of affairs together with her personal actions repeatedly placed on trial.
Even the third time round, her testimony was uncooked. The day earlier than, she had described a childhood of poverty and abuse and what it had meant to her to satisfy a person like Weinstein, who dangled alternatives. “I referred to it as Jekyll and Hyde,” she stated of his unpredictable swings between ingratiating and bullying. “ ‘No,’ ” she stated, “was a giant set off for him.” “No” was what she testified she stated on the DoubleTree, after she adopted Weinstein to a room she didn’t wish to go to and he allegedly blocked her exit, pushed her onto the mattress, and held her down.
Everybody watching knew what would occur subsequent: Weinstein’s new protection would cross-examine Mann about how she continued a seemingly voluntary, typically affectionate relationship with Weinstein. One of many public classes of the Me Too period was that sexual violence is commonly messy and that abuse can look extra like what most individuals perceive to be home violence, the place consent is intermittent and energy and worry can induce give up. However complexity is a headache for prosecutors, and energy can get you one of the best legal professionals.
A prison prosecution is topic to strict process for good cause; juries are supposed to rule on the proof earlier than them and nothing extra. In follow, prosecutors, protection attorneys, and judges make a thousand discretionary selections. None of this happens in a vacuum.
That’s clear from the trajectory of Mann’s case. In 2018, the high-water mark for Me Too, Manhattan prosecutors introduced it to a grand jury and obtained an indictment. In 2020, jurors heard Weinstein’s protection that Mann was simply utilizing him and belatedly crying rape. (She had a panic assault on the stand throughout cross-examination and needed to depart the room.) The jury convicted Weinstein of third-degree rape anyway.
4 years after that, as New York’s highest courtroom heard Weinstein’s enchantment, many accused males had crept again into public life. Time’s Up had collapsed below the load of its personal hypocrisies, together with the information its chairwoman had suggested Andrew Cuomo on discrediting these accusing the governor of sexual harassment.
A 4-3 resolution concluded that the Weinstein trial had been unfair as a result of the jury heard from ladies who stated he had preyed on them however whose accusations had not led to costs. The cumulative impact of the victims’ testimony was a constructing block of Me Too, however calling on ladies to inform their older abuse tales was exactly what led the appeals courtroom to say that that they had overreached. The bulk insisted circumstances like Mann’s didn’t want the extra tales to see justice as a result of what she described was clearly violent. The dissenters responded that this was naïve and ignored “the authorized and sensible realities of proving a scarcity of consent.”
By the point Mann once more took the stand within the spring of 2025, a president discovered chargeable for sexual abuse had appointed a person accused of sexual assault to run the Division of Protection (he denies wrongdoing) and empowered a billionaire to slash authorities spending who had allegedly provided his sperm to legions of ladies (he denies providing his sperm). That yr, Arthur L. Aidala, one among Weinstein’s legal professionals, stated Me Too was as soon as “crucial factor in society” however that now “I feel folks’s heads are in a unique place.” He was partly vindicated — as had been the dissenters on New York’s highest courtroom — when the jury couldn’t resolve whether or not Mann had been raped. (Jurors individually convicted Weinstein of assaulting one lady and acquitted him on costs referring to a second.) A decide ordered a brand new trial.
As jury choice started this April on that new listening to for Mann’s case, Justin Fairfax, the previous lieutenant governor of Virginia who was accused seven years in the past of raping two Black ladies — he denied the allegations and in contrast them to “terror lynchings” — shot his spouse after she tried to depart him, then killed himself. Round that point, Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell resigned after 4 ladies accused him of sexual misconduct, together with rape; they described drugging and assaults that befell lengthy after the teachings of Me Too had supposedly been realized. (The Division of Justice is investigating. Swalwell’s lawyer has stated he “unequivocally denies each allegation.”)
So for all of the declarations of Me Too’s loss of life and the purported consensus that it had gone too far, it appeared the motion hadn’t gone far sufficient to stop Swalwell’s now-abandoned run for California governor or save the lifetime of Cerina Fairfax.
A brand new set of New Yorkers now has to resolve whether or not what Mann has painted as a beatdown acquiescence was truly consent. Within the courtroom, it felt as if we had been all caught in a loop, doomed to confront time and again how a lot abuse warps our society. Even the prosecutor, ostensibly on Mann’s aspect, stumbled at one level, asking her what she did after Weinstein “had intercourse with you” on the DoubleTree. Mann, who had been fragile, stopped her firmly. “I don’t like that query,” she stated. She needed to remind everybody once more that it was rape.
