Harvey Weinstein’s defense team urged a Manhattan jury on Tuesday to acquit the once-powerful Hollywood producer of raping hairstylist and actor Jessica Mann, arguing that she fabricated the allegations amid the #MeToo movement, while prosecutors sought to restore a conviction that had been overturned.
“She has taken on a false narrative about all of this,” Weinstein lawyer Marc Agnifilo said in his closing argument. “She has absolutely no motive to lie. None,” prosecutor Nicole Blumberg replied, referencing Mann’s five days of grueling, deeply personal testimony.
The trial is the third time the case has been presented to a New York jury. Weinstein was convicted in 2020 of raping Mann, but the conviction was later overturned, and a retrial last year ended with a deadlocked jury. The current proceedings focus on the same core allegation: that Weinstein raped Mann in a Manhattan hotel in March 2013.
Mann testified that she had anticipated a professional connection when she met Weinstein but was taken aback by his sexual advances. She decided to have a relationship with the then-married producer, but weeks later, when he took a room at a hotel where she was staying with a friend, she accompanied him upstairs to tell him she did not want a sexual encounter. According to her testimony, Weinstein trapped her in the room, grabbed her arms, insisted she undress, and raped her.
“He just treated me like he owned me,” Mann testified.
The defense argued the encounter was consensual and part of a caring, if on-and-off, relationship. Agnifilo pointed to warm email exchanges and get-togethers before and after the alleged rape, as well as a diary-like note Mann wrote to herself two days after the encounter. The note, which does not name the man, expresses misgivings about her emotional attachment in a nonexclusive relationship but says nothing about an assault. “This is how she’s falling in love with him,” Agnifilo told jurors.
Blumberg countered that Mann was “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.” Over the years, Weinstein encouraged Mann’s acting ambitions, helped her land a hairstyling job, and provided emotional support during her father’s terminal illness — actions the defense characterized as “a sweet, loving, supportive relationship.”
“This was a woman who got manipulated by that man,” Blumberg said. While Mann acknowledged she loved “a part” of Weinstein, she testified that she had begged him not to do anything sexual that day in the hotel. “No means no — to everyone except Harvey Weinstein,” Blumberg added, concluding that Mann “deserves closure and justice.”
Weinstein did not testify. During portions of the summations, he shook his head slightly and exchanged glances with his lawyer. Whatever the verdict, he will remain in prison: he stands convicted of other sex crimes in New York and California, though he is appealing those convictions. A conviction in the current trial could add up to four years in prison — less time than he has already served.
Jurors are expected to begin deliberations on Wednesday.