Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on Wednesday, May 29, 2024. | Photo credit: Steven Hirsch
Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers argued in the appeal that he did not receive a fair trial when he was convicted of rape and sexual assault in Los Angeles in 2022 and sentenced to 16 years in prison.
The brief, filed Friday in California’s 2nd District Court of Appeal, comes six weeks after his similarly landmark #MeToo conviction and 23-year prison sentence in New York was tossed out by the state’s highest court.
The California appeals court argues that the trial judge wrongly excluded evidence that the Italian model and actor he was convicted of raping had a sexual relationship with the director of a film festival who brought both Weinstein and the woman to Los Angeles at the time of the alleged assault.
Weinstein’s lawyers argued that the judge had “deprived him of his constitutional rights to present a defense and caused a miscarriage of justice.”
Lawyers say the judge erred by allowing the jury to be told about Weinstein’s previous, now-dismissed conviction in New York, and that the jury was improperly prejudiced by testimony from women about alleged assaults Weinstein was not accused of. Similar testimony led to his conviction being overturned in New York, where the 72-year-old remains in custody while Manhattan prosecutors plan to try him again.
“Introducing overwhelming, cumulative and remote evidence of prior ‘sexual assaults’ only indicated to the jury that the defendant is a bad man who must be convicted of some crime regardless of whether the prosecution proves its case,” the filing states.
At his trial in California, Weinstein was accused of sexually assaulting four women, but a jury convicted him of assaulting just one woman, Evgenia Chernyshova, who testified that Weinstein came to her hotel room uninvited during the L.A. Italia Film Festival in 2013.
Weinstein’s lawyers argue that Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench erred by preventing his defense from showing the jury Facebook messages that showed Chernyshova and festival founder Pascal Vicedomini had a sexual relationship. The brief argues that the messages would have shown the two had perjured themselves even though they testified they were simply friends and colleagues. And that it would have bolstered the defense’s arguments that the woman was not even in his hotel room, but with Vicedomini at the time of the alleged assault.
These arguments are similar to those made by Weinstein’s lawyers in a petition for a new trial, which Lench rejected before sentencing.
Weinstein has since hired appellate attorneys, including Jennifer Bonjean, a Chicago-based lawyer whose appeal of Bill Cosby’s sexual assault case led to his conviction in Pennsylvania being permanently tossed out.
Chernyshova was known only as Jane Doe 1 during the trial. associated Press Generally people who say they have been sexually abused are not named, unless they come forward publicly, as Chernyshova did after the trial. She gave consent through her lawyer AP using his name.
“Weinstein’s appeal contains the same worn-out arguments he has made many times before in trial court without success,” Chernyshova’s attorney, David Ring, said in an email Friday. “We are of the firm opinion that the trial court properly examined the evidence and made all the right decisions in its evidentiary rulings. We are confident that Weinstein’s appeal will be denied and he will spend many years in prison.”
The defense’s appeal said three jurors signed affidavits saying they now regretted signing the unanimous guilty verdict.
“Jurors confirmed they did not believe there was a romantic relationship between the two and stated that if they had such evidence it would have changed their calculation of the rape,” the filing states.
And Weinstein’s lawyers argue that the lawsuit filed by Chernyshova shortly after the verdict shows she should have been allowed to question whether the state had a financial motive in the outcome.
Weinstein’s defense lawyers first filed a notice of appeal in April 2023 and sought extensions several times before filing briefs on Friday. Prosecutors have until Aug. 6 to file their response.
