Defense attorneys moved to vacate the felony sex crime conviction of the disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, arguing that jurors in his rape retrial reached the guilty verdict “under duress” and that the judge refused to inquire about alleged jury misconduct, therefore preventing their client from having a fair trial. Prosecutors said they plan to investigate the allegations, and the judge scheduled a hearing on the matter for November 19.

“The jurors reached the verdict under duress,” lead defense attorney Arthur Aidala told the Sun outside the courtroom at Manhattan criminal court on Thursday morning, referring to the guilty verdict rendered in Weinstein’s retrial in June. The criminal sexual act conviction, which relates to a former production assistant, Miriam Haley, who accused Weinstein of forcibly performing oral sex on her in his Manhattan apartment in 2006, carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison. Weinstein has not been sentenced yet.       

Mr. Aidala’s team filed a so-called 330.30 motion Monday night, asking the judge to set aside the guilty verdict on grounds of juror misconduct and the court’s failure to “conduct sufficient inquiry when such misconduct was brought to its attention.” The motion stated. The defense further argued that Weinstein was thus “deprived” of his due process right to a fair trial which is embedded in the Fourteenth Amendment.  

Weinstein himself, who’s currently imprisoned on New York City’s notorious Rikers Island, was not present in court on Thursday morning. The presiding judge, Curtis Farber, who appeared on the bench without his robes during a very brief hearing, asked if prosecutors had investigated these allegations. They said they intend to do so in the coming weeks. The judge ordered them to file their response motion by November 10 and scheduled another hearing for November 19.    

The defense’s motion included two affidavits, two sworn statements by two separate jurors, whose names were redacted to protect their privacy. Both jurors stated under oath that they had wanted to acquit Weinstein of the sex crime charge but that they were aggressively pressured and even threatened by other jurors into agreeing to the conviction.   

One juror said, “I was directly pressured to convict Mr. Weinstein on the Miriam Haley charge… If I could have voted by secret ballot, I would have returned a not guilty verdict,” the affidavit reads.  

The second juror also stated, “I believe that the defendant is not guilty on the first count… I was so afraid of the repercussions and feared for my personal safety that I ultimately voted with the majority.” 

Both jurors also said that the judge did not make them feel safe enough to voice what was happening inside the jury room during deliberations to the court. “There came a time when I no longer felt safe or comfortable speaking to the court,” the first juror said. 

“I really wanted to tell the judge everything that had occurred during the deliberations but was afraid to speak freely,” the second juror said. Both jurors explicitly stated that they regretted their verdicts. 

In June, after a five-week long trial, the jury rendered a split verdict on the three-count indictment brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office against the Oscar-winning film producer, two felony sex crimes and one third-degree rape charge. Weinstein was found guilty of first-degree sexual criminal act, relating to Ms. Haley. But he was found not guilty on the second sex crime charge – a new charge added by prosecutors for the retrial – relating to a former Polish model, Kaja Sokola, who also claimed the producer forced oral sex on her in a hotel room in Manhattan also in 2006. 

The third charge, a third-degree rape accusation was brought by the once asipring actress Jessica Mann, who claimed Weinstein raped her in 2013 in a hotel at Manhattan. That charge was left undecided with the judge declaring a mistrial after the jury’s foreman refused to return to the deliberation, saying the atmosphere had become unbearable for him.

The rape charge carries a maximum sentence of four years in prison, which Weinstein has already served, having been incarcerated since 2020. 

The state has indicated it intends to retry Weinstein on that charge, which would be his third trial on that count. 

In 2020, Weinstein, now 73, faced his first trial, where he was found guilty both on the charges regarding Ms. Mann and Ms. Haley. It was a spectacular fall from grace for the once-mightly prestige film producer who had become the poster boy of the #metoo movement that was sparked by an October 2017 piece in the New York Times alleging decades of his sexual misconduct. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison. 

Then in 2024, New York’s highest court, the court of appeals, overturned that conviction and ordered a new trial. The court had found that trial judge wrongly admitted testimony against Weinstein based on vivid allegations from women who were not part of the case, including a “Sopranos” star, Annabella Sciorra, who testified that Weinstein barged into her apartment in the 1990s and raped her, then ruined her career after she refused his further advances.  

Despite this victory, Weinstein remained incarcerated because he had also been convicted of other sex crimes in California in 2022, where he was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Due to his deteriorating health condition, Weinstein was granted permission to stay at Bellevue Hospital during the course of his second trial, which was held in May and June of this year. He is now back at Rikers.    

In his motion, Mr. Aidala, who has been defending Weinstein since 2020, provided meticulous details as to what his team believes occurred amongst the jurors and why the deliberations had gotten so heated. 

According to the court filing, both of the aggrieved jurors, a woman and a man, came to the defense attorney’s office after the verdict was rendered on June 12. The woman told the defense that a certain juror “aggressively screamed” at her on the very first day of deliberations “in response to her stating that she would vote not guilty on all three counts.” The woman further said that “his (the juror’s) hands were shaking as he screamed at her. And that he accused her of ‘deliberately making this a hung jury.’”

The man appeared to offer a similar narrative, he said that anyone in the jury room, who was questioning Weinstein’s guilt, was “grilled” while those who were ready to convict him “faced no scrutiny,” and that he was even “verbally assaulted” by one of the other jurors, when he was told, “I check people who talk to me like that. You don’t know me. I’ll catch you outside.”

The juror also provided the previously undisclosed detail that he had overheard two jurors in the elevator, discussing yet another juror, whom they believed to have been bribed by Weinstein and his defense team to find the defendant not guilty. 

“Their only reasons for reaching such a conclusion,” his affidavit states, “was that the Juror XX believed that Mr. Weinstein was not guilty on all three counts.” 

“The false allegation that Juror XX was being paid,” the statement went on,” fundamentally shifted deliberations from an even 6-6 split to a sudden unanimous verdict.” 

“I did not want to be yelled at and ultimately voted with the majority for the sake of peace,” the man said. He also found that the judge did not take his concerns seriously.  

“On Friday, June 6, I approached Judge Farber on two separate occasions, alerting him of juror misconduct. In this exchange, I was made uncomfortable by both the open forum, and the judge’s responses to the issues I presented. I felt that my comments were unwelcome; for that reason I did not share further instances of juror misconduct as deliberations progressed…I felt that Judge Farber’s did not take my concerns seriously, and I became reluctant to speak up.”   

As the Sun reported, and as the motion reiterated, the juror sent a note to the judge on the second day of deliberations that he needed to express a concern he had. He was then called into the courtroom, and questioned in open court, meaning in front of the press and the public and the attorneys. But, according to the motion, the judge “prevented the Juror from disclosing” his reasons for alleging the jury misconduct instead the judge “cut off any further information, saying, ‘All right, thank you for bringing that to my attention.’” 

The judge said that the jurors had only been deliberating for a day and a half and that heated discussions in the jury room were not unusual. He did not allow the juror to reveal any details, it appeared, because jurors are not allowed to discuss the conversations from inside the deliberation room with the judge or the attorneys. 

But the man came back into the courtroom a second time that same day, asking to be relieved of his jury duty because he felt “in good conscience” he could not continue to partake in these deliberations which he found to be “not fair and not just.” 

The judge did not dismiss the juror, arguing that the alternates had already left and that the man had taken an oath to serve. But the defense argued in their motion (and at the trial) that a judge must address any jury misconduct by either dismissing an unqualified juror or by declaring a mistrial, which the judge ultimately did for the third charge.

The motion also accused the judge of “scolding” the juror by telling him “This was a five week trial, all right. A lot of people put a lot of energy into this. If I was to excuse you, then the trial falls apart and I have to do the whole thing over again, all right.” 

The defense, who asked for numerous mistrials during deliberations (and during the entire trial) is now pushing (again) for that third trial arguing that Weinstein’s due process rights have been violated. Both jurors stated in their affidavits that they each believe Weinstein did not get  “a fair trial.”     

When the Sun asked Mr. Aidala, if he was hopeful that his motion would succeed, he said “Let’s see what their investigation unfolds.” 

Prosecutors will now begin to investigate and most likely speak to the jurors. Their response motion is due on November 10.