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Harvey Weinstein’s rape retrial opened in New York on Tuesday for the third time, with prosecutors portraying Weinstein as a former Hollywood power player who used his influence as a tool of sexual assault. Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Candace White told jurors during opening statements that the case would come down to “power, to control and to manipulation,” while Alvin Bragg watched from the audience. White and the defense set up what they called the central dispute—power and manipulation versus consent and choice—at the start of a trial nearly eight years after Weinstein was arrested.
Weinstein’s lawyer Jacob Kaplan, responding in his opening statement, countered that the case “is about consent, about choice and about regret.” Kaplan also echoed Weinstein’s longstanding defense that the encounter described by the accuser had been recast as a crime after Weinstein’s fall from influence. The AP reported that Weinstein previously pleaded not guilty, and he told reporters in January that he had been unfaithful to his then-wife and “acted wrongly, but I never assaulted anyone.”
Prosecutors and defense attorneys framed how the jury should interpret Weinstein’s past and the relationship at issue. White said jurors should view Weinstein’s behavior as rooted in a pattern of control, telling jurors that Weinstein “was used to getting his way” professionally and personally. White also argued that behind closed doors, “power meant him taking what he wanted from the victim in this case,” according to the AP’s account of opening statements.
The defense disputed that framing and leaned into a different reading of what Mann and Weinstein did and what each party got from the relationship. Kaplan told jurors, “Ask yourself: What is Jessica Mann getting from Harvey Weinstein?” according to the AP. The defense also suggested that the case is not a simple credibility contest, while maintaining that Weinstein never assaulted Mann.
The retrial differs from earlier proceedings in ways prosecutors and defense described in court and in the way the judge managed evidence. The AP said the prior trials included other accusers and charges, but this trial is pared down to a single question about what happened between Weinstein and hairstylist and actor Jessica Mann in a hotel room in Manhattan one morning in 2013. The AP reported that while the case centers on that encounter, jurors will hear about the relationship before and after that day, in part because it is relevant to the parties’ competing accounts.
The AP also reported that Weinstein’s legal team has changed since earlier trials, and with it the defense’s approach to certain lines of questioning. The new attorneys have signaled they will rein in some questions about a claims fund for women who said Weinstein sexually mistreated them, according to the AP. Prosecutors, meanwhile, asked the judge to allow the addition of at least one new witness: a close friend of Mann’s from the time of the alleged rape. The defense objected to both potential new witnesses, including a possible court-officer witness whom prosecutors said recently disclosed a remark Weinstein made in 2020.
Judge Curtis Farber, according to the AP, also revisited parts of courtroom procedure and evidence rules for this retrial. Farber limited questioning Tuesday about a list of “friends of Harvey” that Weinstein’s assistants maintained for event guest lists. Jurors learned that Mann and another expected witness were on the list, but unlike at last year’s trial, the panel was not told that the roster was all women.
The AP said Mann was 27 at the time of the alleged encounter, describing her then as struggling financially, having recently lived in her car, and seeking to break into big-time acting when she met Weinstein at a Los Angeles-area party in early 2013. Mann testified previously that she was looking for a professional connection but ended up, ambivalently, in a consensual relationship with Weinstein, then married. During a trip to New York with a friend in March 2013, she arranged a breakfast for pals and Weinstein, and she testified that Weinstein later trapped her in a hotel room, ignored her protestation that “I don’t want to do this,” demanded she undress and grabbed her arms. Mann testified that she “just wanted to get out,” and she said she succumbed because she wanted to leave.
White told jurors Tuesday that Weinstein’s alleged pattern of control continued beyond the alleged assault. The AP reported that Weinstein shook his head slightly at one point as White claimed he had “silenced” Mann by letting her know that crossing him could be professional quicksand, and that Mann testified that for years she told no one about the alleged rape. The AP said Mann kept seeing Weinstein afterward—accepting invitations, asking him for career help, and sending warm messages—describing her as trying to avoid angering him. Kaplan, in response, told jurors the case is a contest over what Mann would be getting from Weinstein, and he argued that the dispute is not “he said, she said” in the simple way prosecutors described it.
Weinstein, now 73 and serving time in prison, is an Academy Award-winning producer and studio boss who helped bring films including “Pulp Fiction,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “Gangs of New York” to movie houses and produced TV shows such as “Project Runway.” The AP said he was also a prominent Democratic donor, and that his career collapsed in 2017 as public accusations against him emerged in news reports and social media, followed by criminal charges in New York and Los Angeles. Weinstein’s rape conviction on the New York charge had been overturned, and a jury deadlocked in the last trial, leaving the 2013 Manhattan hotel allegation in place for this third retrial.
The AP said it does not identify people who say they have been sexually assaulted unless they agree to be named, as Mann has done.