Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers say he was denied a fair trial in LA rape case

Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers argue in an appeal that he did not receive a fair trial when he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for rape and sexual assault in Los Angeles in 2022.

The brief, filed Friday in California’s Second District Court of Appeals, comes six weeks after his similar, landmark #MeToo conviction and 23-year prison sentence in New York were overturned by the state’s highest court.

The California appeal argues that the trial judge improperly ignored evidence that the Italian model and actor he was convicted of raping had a sexual relationship with the director of a film festival that had brought both Weinstein and the woman to Los Angeles at the time of the alleged assault.

Weinstein’s lawyers argued that the judge “denied him his constitutional right to defense and caused a miscarriage of justice.”

The lawyers say the judge improperly informed the jury of Weinstein’s previous, now-overturned conviction in New York, and that the jury was unfairly biased by women’s testimony about alleged assaults that Weinstein was not accused of.

Due to similar statements, the verdict was overturned in New York. The 72-year-old is currently in custody there, while the public prosecutor in Manhattan is planning a new trial against him.

“The presentation of this excessive, cumulative and remote evidence of prior ‘sexual assault’ merely signaled to the jury that the defendant was a bad person who should be convicted of anything, regardless of whether the prosecution proved its case,” the filing states.

At his trial in California, Weinstein was charged with sexually abusing four women. However, the jury only found him guilty of assaulting one woman: Evgeniya Chernyshova, who testified that Weinstein showed up uninvited at her hotel room during the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival.

Weinstein’s lawyers argue that Supreme Court Judge Lisa B. Lench wrongly prohibited his defense from showing the jury Facebook messages showing that Chernyshova and festival founder Pascal Vicedomini had a sexual relationship.

The messages showed that both had committed perjury when they said they were just friends and colleagues, the brief said. They also supported the defense’s arguments that the woman was not even in her hotel room at the time of the alleged attack, but was with Vicedomini.

The arguments are similar to those Weinstein’s lawyers made in a motion for a retrial, which Lench rejected before his sentencing.