Harvey Weinstein Lawyers argue in an appeal that he did not get 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 petition filed Friday with California’s Second District Court of Appeal comes six weeks after his similar #MeToo conviction and 23-year prison sentence in New York were annulled by the state’s highest court.
The California appeal argues that the trial judge improperly excluded evidence that the Italian model and actor he was convicted of rape and had a sexual relationship with the director of a film festival who took Weinstein and his wife to Los Angeles at the time of the alleged attack.
Weinstein’s lawyers argued that the judge deprived him of “his constitutional rights to present a defense and led to a miscarriage of justice.”
Lawyers say the judge erred in allowing jurors to know of Weinstein’s previous, now overturned conviction in New York, and that the jury was unfairly prejudiced by testimony from women about alleged assaults for which Weinstein was not charged. Similar testimony led to his conviction being overturned in New York, where the 72-year-old is being held as Manhattan prosecutors plan to try him again.
“The introduction of this excessive, cumulative, and remote evidence of prior ‘sexual assaults’ simply signaled to the jury that the defendant was a bad man who should be convicted of something, regardless of whether the prosecution had proven its case,” the lawsuit states.
At his trial in California, Weinstein was accused of sexually assaulting four women, but a jury convicted him of assaulting just one, Evgeniya Chernyshova, who testified that Weinstein showed up uninvited in his hotel room during the LA Italia Film Festival in 2013.
Weinstein’s lawyers argue that Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench erred in preventing his defense from showing the jury Facebook messages that showed that Chernyshova and the festival’s founder, Pascal Vicedomini, had a sexual relationship. The messages would have shown that both were committing perjury when they testified that they were just friends and colleagues, the document argues. And it would have reinforced the defense’s arguments that the woman was not even in her hotel room, but was with Vicedomini at the time of the alleged attack.
The arguments are similar to those made by Weinstein’s lawyers in a motion for a new trial that Lench rejected before his sentencing.
Since then, Weinstein has hired appellate lawyers, including Jennifer Bonjean, a Chicago-based lawyer whose appeal in Bill Cosby sexual assault case had his Pennsylvania conviction permanently overturned.
Chernyshova only went by Jane Doe 1 during the trial. The Associated Press typically does not name people who say they were sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly, as Chernyshova did after the trial. She consented, through her lawyer, to the AP using her name.
“Weinstein’s appeal presents the same tired arguments that he has previously presented to the trial court several times, unsuccessfully,” Chernyshova’s lawyer, David Ring, said in an email on Friday. appropriately and made all the correct decisions in his evidentiary decisions. We are confident that Weinstein’s appeal will be denied and that he will spend many years in prison.”
The defense’s appeals summary says three of the jurors signed statements saying they now regret signing a unanimous guilty verdict.
The lawsuit says that “the jurors confirmed that they did not believe the couple were romantically linked and explained that if they had access to such evidence, it would have changed their calculation about whether any rape had occurred.”
And Weinstein’s lawyers argue that a lawsuit filed by Chernyshova shortly after the verdict demonstrates that they should have been allowed to question whether she had financial motives for the state’s outcome.
Weinstein’s defense attorneys first filed a notice of appeal in April 2023 and asked for several extensions before filing Friday’s petition. The prosecution has until August 6 to present its response.
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