The retrial of Harvey Weinstein ended abruptly Thursday when the jury foreman refused to join the deliberations on the remaining rape charge against the disgraced movie mogul.
New York state Judge Curtis Farber declared a mistrial and prosecutors vowed to try Weinstein again on the charge the jury had been deadlocked on, the third-degree rape charge that accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting former actor Jessica Mann.
The dramatic ending came a day after the jury announced it had unanimously found Weinstein guilty of sexually assaulting one woman and not guilty of assaulting another more than a decade ago. The verdicts on the other two counts stand.
After the partial verdict was announced Wednesday, Mann released a statement saying, “I would never lie about rape or use something so traumatic to hurt someone.”
“I didn’t speak up to ruin his life,” Mann said of Weinstein. “He did that. I spoke because mine matters.”
Weinstein found himself on trial again after the state Court of Appeals last year overturned his landmark 2020 conviction for sexually abusing women.
That trial defined the #MeToo movement and helped turn Weinstein, the Oscar-winning former chief of Miramax, into a pariah. But the appeals court found that the judge in that trial had improperly allowed testimony against Weinstein based on allegations that were not part of the case.
Still, much of the evidence that resulted in Weinstein’s being convicted five years ago of the third-degree rape of one woman and a first-degree criminal sex act against another woman was reintroduced at his retrial.
Just as before, Weinstein pleaded not guilty to a charge of third-degree rape based on complaints by Mann, and a charge of first-degree criminal sexual act brought by former “Project Runway” production assistant Miriam Haley.
But this time, Weinstein faced an additional charge of first-degree criminal sexual act in the alleged sexual assault of a Polish former runway model named Kaja Sokola.
Weinstein, 73, denied all the charges and his lawyers insisted the sexual encounters with his three accusers were “transactional” and “consensual” and accused the three women of being grifters.
During the five days of deliberations, the jury foreman had reported to Farber that they were having a hard time reaching a verdict on the Mann charge and that several members had been clashing.
Right before the partial verdict was unveiled Wednesday, the foreman told the court he’d been threatened by another member of the panel who told him, “You know me; you going to see me outside.”
“I feel afraid inside there,” the juror told Farber, according to a transcript of the conversation supplied by the state court. “I can’t be inside there.”
Farber told the lawyers he would ask the jury if they’d reached a verdict on some of the counts and that he would instruct the jury to continue deliberating on the other charge.
Weinstein defense attorney Arthur Aidala immediately objected.
“You have a grown man who has now said that people have told him in the jury room they’ll meet him outside,” Aidala said. “He said it twice.”
But Farber said what the juror was describing was just “schoolyard nonsense.”
At that point, Weinstein made a last-minute plea for a mistrial, saying, “This is not right for me, the person who is on trial here.”
Farber moved forward with his decision and minutes later, the jurors returned to the courtroom and rendered a partial verdict.
Weinstein was found guilty of criminal sexual act for the 2006 attack on Haley. But he was found not guilty of a second charge of criminal sexual act stemming from allegations brought Sokola, who told the court he assaulted her, too, in 2006.
