‘The Good, the Bad, the Ugly’: Closing Arguments in Weinstein Case Highlight Mann’s Conflicting Emotions Toward Alleged Rapist

In a last bid to convince jurors of their position before the jury heads to deliberations on Wednesday, a defense attorney for movie mogul Harvey Weinstein said in his closing argument that the woman accusing his client of rape is lying. The prosecutor pushed back, saying the former aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, has no motive to lie. “People lie for a reason,” the assistant district attorney, Nicole Blumberg, told the jury during her summation. “And Jessica had absolutely no motive to lie, none.” For almost three hours the prosecutor attempted to persuade the jury that Weinstein raped Ms. Mann at the Midtown Manhattan DoubleTree Hotel in 2013.“The testimony of the witness is sufficient to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Ms. Blumberg said, referring to the five-day long testimony Ms. Mann provided during the rape trial, the third on this particular charge in six years at this lower Manhattan courthouse.On the other side, defense attorney Marc Agnifilo told the jury in his closing argument that the case lacked facts and that the evidence showed the allegation is “just not true.” Ms. Mann was “someone that is so invested in being seen a certain way that she is willing to falsify the truth,” he asserted. Weinstein, 74, sat quietly in a wheelchair at the defense table, holding the vampire murder mystery, “The Fox and the Devil,” by Kiersten White on his lap. Since the onset of this saga in 2017, Weinstein has held that all sexual encounters were consensual and he is not guilty of any sex crimes. When the Manhattan district attorney’s office first brought the charge in 2020, the jury convicted Weinstein on the third-degree rape count. The New York Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in 2024. Prosecutors retried the allegation the following year. The jury could not agree on a verdict and the judge declared a mistrial. Weinstein refused to take a plea deal. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office could have dropped the charge, but decided to go to trial again even though the class E felony carries a maximum sentence of only four years in prison, which Weinstein would have already served since his incarceration began in 2020. The defendant has remained behind bars because he was also convicted in California for sex crimes involving other women, in which he received a 16-year prison sentence. He is appealing those convictions.He is currently being held at the infirmary on New York’s Rikers Island, where he recently told an interviewer he is dying. According to his attorneys, he suffers from numerous illnesses such as bone marrow cancer, diabetes, and a heat condition.Weinstein, who has shaken up his legal team between four and six times over the last eight years, hired a new law firm for this trial, Agnifilo Intrater. The team is comprised of Teny Geragos, the daughter of celebrity defense attorney Mark Geragos, Jacob Kaplan, and Marc Agnifilo.“Marc cut through the attempt to turn narrative into evidence and brought the focus back to actual evidence and contemporaneous documentation,” Weinstein told The New York Sun through his spokesman, Juda Engelmayer, on Tuesday. To illustrate that “narrative,” the defense attorney began his summation like a fairy tale: “Once upon a time, a movie producer … at a party … in a house … overlooking Los Angeles, was talking to a Brazilian actress, who was the only one who gave him any food at the Hollywood party.” Weinstein met Ms. Mann at a party in Los Angeles in early 2013 with her friend and then-roommate, Brazilian actress Talia Mayer. The movie producer was a Hollywood legend at the time while Ms. Mann, who arrived from a dairy farm in Washington State, was a 27-year-old aspiring actress working as a hairdresser and living out of her suitcase. Ms. Blumberg repeatedly emphasized the “power imbalance” during her summation. She accused Weinstein of using his influence in the film industry to get his victim to do what he wanted. While she was seeking acting opportunities, “he wanted to have sex with Jessican Mann,” the prosecutor argued. “Her thoughts and her feelings were completely irrelevant.” “He wanted her body and the more she said ‘no’ and the more she resisted, the more violent he became,” Ms. Blumberg said. “This is a woman who was manipulated.” The defense rejected that notion, saying the two had a “sweet, loving and supporting relationship.” On the witness stand, Ms. Mann described a dinner with Weinstein at The Peninsula Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles as a “business meeting.” The defense attorney countered that the two had no business to discuss and the meeting was clearly a date. Emails and other forms of communication corroborate that their relationship lasted four years, and was indeed, at times, sweet and loving. Ms. Mann had consented to some sexual encounters, she testified, but not on that morning, when Weinstein raped her at the DoubleTree Hotel in Manhattan. “Because she consented on day one doesn’t mean she consented on day two. That’s not how it works. No means no to everyone except to Harvey Weinstein,” the prosecutor said. Ms. Blumberg reminded the jury that Ms. Mann had testified that she tried to open the door of the hotel room and leave, but Weinstein shut the door twice, grabbed her wrists, and demanded that she undress immediately until he eventually pinned her down on the bed and forced himself on her. “He just treated me like he owned me,” Ms. Mann testified. The defense questioned why, if Ms. Mann had been raped, she wrote a love note into her cellphone two days later. “Do I love myself enough to make mistakes?” Ms. Mann asked herself in the journal-like entry retrieved from one of the cellphones she handed over to the Manhattan district attorney’s office in 2018. Mr. Agnifilo, whose team presented the note for the first time as evidence, interpreted the writing as Ms. Mann’s concern about falling in love with Weinstein, who at the time was married to the English fashion designer and actress, Georgina Chapman, with whom he shares two children. Ms. Mann was worried, the defense attorney suggested, because “she didn’t view herself as a person who would sleep with a married man with a child on the way.” Mr. Agnifilo went on to argue that Ms. Mann was “struggling with this new relationship.” He told the jury, that unlike her family or her friends, Weinstein believed and encouraged Ms. Mann’s creative talents. “What did Harvey see in her?” Mr. Agnifilo said. “She’s a beautiful writer. She is special. The way she thinks. The struggle in this note is beautiful.” Ms. Mann did not report the rape to the police until 2017 when headlines of Weinstein’s sexual abuse allegations dominated the news. Almost 100 women accused Weinstein of rape and sexual harassment after actress Ashley Judd detailed to the New York Times in October 2017 how Weinstein made unwanted advances toward her and then damaged her career when she rejected him. The Times article, which alleged years of sexual misconduct and cover-up by Weinstein, launched the short-lived #MeToo movement. Prominent actresses like Angelina Jolie and Gwyneth Paltrow spoke out against the producer.“She did the best to bury her trauma,” Ms. Blumberg said about the victim.In her closing, the prosecutor often cited her expert, clinical and forensic psychologist, Dr. Lisa Rocchio, who testified last Friday. She said Ms. Mann’s testimony was “messy,” because she was traumatized. “She’s burying what the defendant did to her, and she’s struggling with the good parts of the defendant and the awful, the evil parts of the defendant.” Ms. Blumberg said, “She’s telling you the good, the bad, the ugly.” On Wednesday morning the judge will charge the jury, who will then begin to deliberate. A verdict could come as soon as this week.

‘The Good, the Bad, the Ugly’: Closing Arguments in Weinstein Case Highlight Mann’s Conflicting Emotions Toward Alleged Rapist

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