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LOS ANGELES, Dec. 20 (AP) — After a month-long trial and nine days of deliberations, Los Angeles jurors on Monday found Harvey Weinstein guilty of raping and sexually assaulting the four accusers he is accused of abusing one of.
But the three guilty charges involving the Italian actor and model, known at trial as Jane Doe 1, still deal a major blow to the disgraced film mogul and provide another #five years after he became a magnet for the movement MeToo moment of reckoning.
Weinstein, who is currently appealing two years of his 23-year sentence for his rape and sexual assault convictions in New York, could face up to 24 years in California after his conviction.
He was convicted of rape, forced oral sex and another count of sexual misconduct involving the woman who said he showed up uninvited at the door of her hotel room during the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival .
“Harvey Weinstein destroyed a part of me forever that night in 2013, and I can never get it back. The criminal trial was brutal, Weinstein’s lawyers had me tortured on the witness stand, but I knew I had to stay the course, I did,” the woman said in a statement after the verdict. “I hope Weinstein never sees the outside of a prison cell in his lifetime.”
Weinstein was acquitted of sexual assault charges filed in 2010 by a massage therapist who treated him at a hotel.
A jury was unable to reach a verdict on charges involving two of the accusers, particularly rape and sexual assault allegations involving documentary filmmaker and wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. A mistrial was declared for these charges.
Weinstein looked down at the table and appeared to put his hands over his face as the initial guilty plea was read. He looked forward to the reading of the rest of the judgment.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys had no immediate comment on the verdict.
“Harvey Weinstein will never be able to rape another woman. He will live out the rest of his life where he belongs,” Siebel Newsom said in a statement. “Throughout the trial, Weinstein’s lawyers used sexism, misogyny, and bullying to intimidate, belittle, and mock us survivors. The trial is a stark reminder that we, as a society, have a lot of work to do .”
Siebel Newsom’s intense and dramatic testimony, in which she described being raped by Weinstein in a hotel room in 2005, provided the most dramatic moment of the trial. But only eight of the 12 jurors agreed to find Weinstein guilty of those charges.
Jurors were deadlocked 10-2 on the sexual assault count involving Lauren Young, the only accuser to testify in both Weinstein trials. She said she was a model aspiring to become an actress and screenwriter, and when she met with Weinstein in 2013 about the script, Weinstein trapped her in a hotel bathroom, groped and masturbated in front of her.
In the absence of any forensic evidence or eyewitness accounts of years of allegations, the case rests heavily on the stories and credibility of the four women at the center of the allegations.
The women’s stories echo allegations from dozens of others who have emerged since Weinstein became a #MeToo lightning rod in 2017, starting with a 2017 New York Times report. A film about the report, “She Said,” was released during the trial, and jurors were repeatedly warned not to watch it.
However, it was the defense that made #MeToo an issue during the trial, emphasizing that none of the four women went to authorities before the movement made Weinstein a target.
Defense attorneys say two of the women — including one whom he will be convicted of rape — flatly lied about their encounter with Weinstein. They said the other two had “100 percent consensual” sexual interactions, which they later redesigned.
Defense attorneys said during the trial that if Siebel Newsom didn’t become famous later, she would be “just another slut who slept with Harvey Weinstein in order to get ahead in Hollywood”.
“Remorse and rape are not the same thing,” Weinstein’s attorney, Alan Jackson, said in closing arguments.
He urged jurors to ignore the women’s emotional testimony and focus on factual evidence.
“Trust us because we’re crazy, trust us because we cried,” Jackson said jurors were asked to do. “Well, anger doesn’t make the truth. Tears don’t make the truth.”
All of the women involved in the charges were taken in court by Doe. The AP typically does not name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly or agree to be named through a lawyer, as the women featured here did.
Prosecutors called 40 other witnesses to try to provide context and corroboration to the stories. Four are other women who were not part of the charges but testified that Weinstein raped or sexually assaulted them. They were brought into the stands to establish a pattern of sexual predation.
Weinstein defeated four other felony charges even before the trial ended, when prosecutors said a woman he was accused of raping twice and sexually assaulting twice would not testify. They declined to give a reason. Judge Lisa Lench dismissed the charges. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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