Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers argue he was denied a fair trial in his appeal against his rape conviction in LA

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.”

Lawyers say the judge improperly informed jurors of Weinstein’s previous, now-overturned conviction in New York, and the jury was unfairly biased by testimony from women about alleged assaults that Weinstein was not charged with. Similar testimony led to his conviction being overturned in New York, where the 72-year-old is being held while prosecutors in Manhattan plan to retry 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 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 would have shown that both committed perjury when they testified that they were just friends and colleagues, the brief says. And it would have strengthened 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.

Weinstein has since hired appellate lawyers, including Jennifer Bonjean, a Chicago-based attorney whose appeal in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault case resulted in his conviction in Pennsylvania being ultimately overturned.

Chernyshova was referred to only as Jane Doe 1 during the trial. The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they were sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Chernyshova did after the trial. Through her lawyer, she gave the AP permission to use her name.

“Weinstein’s appeal raises the same tired arguments that he has unsuccessfully raised in court multiple times before,” Chernyshova’s attorney, David Ring, said in an email Friday. “We firmly believe that the court adequately reviewed the evidence and made all the correct decisions in its evidentiary rulings. We are confident that Weinstein’s appeal will be denied and that he will spend many years in prison.”

The defense’s appeal states that three jurors signed affidavits saying they now regretted having agreed to a unanimous guilty verdict.

The filing states: “The jury confirmed that they did not believe there was a romantic relationship between the two and stated that their assessment of whether rape had occurred would have been changed if they had had access to such evidence.”

And Weinstein’s lawyers argue that a lawsuit filed by Chernyshova shortly after the verdict shows they should have been allowed to question whether Chernyshova had financial motives in the state’s decision.

Weinstein’s defense team initially filed an appeal in April 2023 and asked for several extensions before filing their brief on Friday. Prosecutors have until August 6 to file their response.

Andrew Dalton, Associated Press