NEW YORK (AP) — After five weeks of testimony from Harvey Weinstein ’s accusers and other prosecution witnesses at his sex crimes retrial, his defense has started presenting its own witnesses. But it's unclear whether the ex-studio boss himself will be one of them.
He's due to decide in the coming days whether to testify. His lawyers have spent last weekend and recent evenings talking through pros and cons with him, and the discussions were ongoing Thursday evening.
“There's no easy answer,” attorney Arthur Aidala said outside court.
If Weinstein does take the stand, it would be a remarkable twist — and potentially risky legal move — in the yearslong saga of the onetime Hollywood honcho-turned-#MeToo outcast.
Weinstein, 73, is being retried on rape and sexual assault charges because New York's highest court overturned his 2020 conviction. He denies the allegations, and his attorneys maintain that anything that happened between him and his accusers was consensual.
Weinstein didn't testify at his first trial, nor at a separate rape trial in Los Angeles, where he also was convicted and has appealed the verdict. Many defendants in U.S. criminal cases don’t take the stand: The Constitution guarantees that they don’t have to, and jurors are told they can't hold such silence against the accused. Plus, testifying opens a defendant up to pointed questioning from prosecutors.
Weinstein has been watching the New York retrial intently from the defense table, sometimes shaking his head at accusers' testimony and often leaning over to one or another of his attorneys to convey his thoughts.
“He thinks that the evidence in this trial has been challenged very forcefully and that many of the complainants' stories have been torn apart," Aidala said after court Thursday.
But “there is a part of him that is seriously contemplating whether — in a he-said, she-said case — human beings feel obligated to hear the other side of the story,” the attorney added.
Weinstein's lawyers began calling witnesses late Wednesday, starting with a physician-pharmacist discussing a medication that had come up in testimony.
Jurors heard Thursday from Helga Samuelsen, who shared a New York apartment in fall 2005 with Kaja Sokola, one of Weinstein's accusers. Sokola alleges that Weinstein forced oral sex on her the following year, after a series of unwanted advances that began when she was a 16-year-old fashion model in 2002.
Sokola told jurors weeks ago that she never spent time with Weinstein in the apartment where she and Samuelsen stayed. But Samuelsen testified Thursday that one evening the doorbell rang, Sokola answered it and there was Weinstein.
Samuelsen recalled that he and Sokola went into a bedroom, closed the door and emerged about a half-hour later, when Sokola saw Weinstein out. Samuelsen said she never spoke to Sokola about the visit.
“I think I kind of chose to not, really,” said Samuelsen, who was then a photographer's assistant.
Having met Weinstein briefly in summer 2005, she later sought his help as she tried to launch a music career. He made some introductions and invited her to write a never-used movie score, Samuelsen said, and she formed a New York-area cabaret act around 2019 with a woman close to him. Samuelsen now works in insurance in her native Denmark.
During the prosecution's phase of the trial, Weinstein's lawyers asked plenty of questions aimed at raising doubts about the credibility and accuracy of what jurors were hearing from prosecution witnesses, particularly Weinstein’s three accusers in the case: Sokola, Miriam Haley and Jessica Mann.
All three women were trying to build careers in show business and say he preyed on them by dangling work prospects. Mann alleges he raped her in 2013. Haley, like Sokola, accuses Weinstein of forcibly performing oral sex on her in 2006.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted, but Sokola, Mann and Haley have given their permission to be identified.
