On Monday afternoon, the disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, who had been standing trial at the New York Supreme Court since early January, was found guilty of two felony sex crimes: for raping the once aspiring actress Jessica Mann in a midtown-Manhattan DoubleTree hotel, in 2013; and for forcing oral sex on the former production assistant Miriam Haley in his Soho apartment, in 2006. (Weinstein is now in the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital, awaiting a hearing on March 11th, at which he will be sentenced to between five and twenty-nine years in prison. Still forthcoming is a trial in Los Angeles, where he is charged with sexually assaulting two more women, in 2013.) These were the two lesser counts that Weinstein faced in the trial; on Friday, the jury told Judge James M. Burke that they were unable to unanimously determine whether the producer was guilty of predatory sexual assault—a more serious charge that relied on statements by the actress Annabella Sciorra, who, as a corroborating witness for the prosecution, testified, in January, that Weinstein had raped her in the winter of 1993–94. Monday’s verdict arrived without a conviction on that charge.
Still, even without the heavier conviction, when the verdict was announced, I found myself abruptly on the verge of tears, moved by a combination of relief and disbelief. My reaction surprised me a little. Over the last few weeks, I had been attending the Weinstein trial off and on. I had never reported from a courtroom before, and what struck me most of all, perhaps, was how quickly I had become desensitized to the trial and its environment. Listening as prosecution witnesses described the loathsome ways that Weinstein had assaulted them was difficult, and occasionally enraging, but the horror was more often than not dampened and subsumed by the business-as-usual regularity of the trial’s setting. A line of reporters waiting resignedly in the cold each morning for the building to open, at 8 A.M.; court officers pacing the room’s aisles, back and forth, back and forth, occasionally heeding a spectator’s complaints of overheating by opening, with long poles, the room’s high, grimy windows; the showboating defense attorneys schmoozing with acquaintances in the court’s pews; the plainer prosecution lawyers, poring over a drab clutch of brown accordion files; even Weinstein himself, looking like hell, with his walker and rumpled suits and sallow, stubbled face: all of these elements came to seem, in their banal repetitiveness, like an enclosed bit of theatre that might go on forever, without much relation to the outside world.
The vacuum-like nature of a trial is meant, ideally, to allow justice to be served: to enable a jury to dispassionately examine the evidence brought before it, without considering the broader context beyond the courtroom’s walls. And yet, sitting there, I sometimes worried that, in this case, the blank, carefully circumscribed proceduralism of the legal system might fail us. A case taken alone, with scant background, might lead one to overlook the tangled, often pernicious ways in which power dynamics, inflected by gender, operate in the workplace, and perhaps especially in the entertainment industry, largely to the detriment of young women. Absent a sense of the fact that we tend to disbelieve or blame victims of assault, it might be easier for defense lawyers to paint accusers as untrustworthy and their testimonies as suspect. With the #MeToo movement, we have begun to see a burgeoning recognition of the larger framework in which patterns of abuse take place. My fear was that the court, with its useful but limiting fictions of how juries operate and how justice should be served, might strip away this context, and roll back any gains that the movement had made.
In the case of Harvey Weinstein, justice has eluded victims for years. More than ninety women have accused the producer of sexual harassment and assault, and yet he had managed for decades to render his repulsive acts unremarkable—either literally unspoken, or, if spoken, immediately brushed aside and suppressed. As Ronan Farrow, in his groundbreaking reporting on the Weinstein accusers for The New Yorker, noted, the mogul’s behavior had been an open secret for many years. And yet he relied on a combination of physical and psychological intimidation and manipulation, money, powerful connections, and, perhaps most of all, a system almost entirely indifferent to the plight of women, to achieve a stunning kind of trickery: so many people knew that he was a serial predator, but their knowledge did not, for many years, make a whit of actual difference. In October, 2017, when the Times published its first investigation into Weinstein’s alleged history of sexual assault, which he had not infrequently resolved with accusers by reaching settlements bolstered by nondisclosure agreements, Weinstein told the paper, “my motto is to keep the peace.”
But this bone-chilling version of “peace” has had a price, of course. In 2015, as Farrow first reported, the Filipina-Italian model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who was then twenty-two, told the police that Weinstein had assaulted her during a business meeting at his Tribeca office, groping her breasts and attempting to put his hand up her skirt against her will. She agreed to wear a wire the following day in an attempt to extract an incriminating statement from the producer. On the recording, which was shared with Farrow, Gutierrez could be heard resisting Weinstein’s attempts to coax her into his hotel room, before demanding to know why he had groped her the day before. In response, Weinstein admitted that this was the kind of par-for-the-course behavior that he was “used to,” but promised that he “won’t do it again.” In a move that was widely criticized later on, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office decided not to press charges against Weinstein. Gutierrez, faced with Weinstein’s powerful legal team, signed, in exchange for payment, a nondisclosure agreement stating that the acts he admitted to in the recording never took place. Earlier this month, she told The Cut that, though she has never regretted coming forward, the incident left her suffering from a deep depression. “I knew what the truth was, and that nobody would listen,” she said.
On Monday, after the verdict was announced, a heartened Gutierrez spoke to reporters outside the court. “In 2015, I tried for whatever I could have possibly done…” she paused for a moment, then continued, “to get him to what happened today.” The verdict that had finally been reached, she said, is “something I was dreaming of for years.” Indeed, there was a sense of slight unreality about the moment. In recognizing the horror of at least some of Weinstein’s deeds, the court signalled that powerful institutions are beginning to listen to women’s voices, and that the legal system might learn to address sexual violence in all its contextual complexity. It seemed possible that we might be able move beyond a world in which men like Weinstein operate with impunity—a world that we had all grown used to, and which his defense team had tried to convince us need never change. Outside the court building, one of Weinstein’s attorneys, Donna Rotunno, noted that her client’s legal team would appeal the verdict. Still, she added, Weinstein “took it like a man.” In the courtroom, the Times reported, once the verdict was read and court officers approached Weinstein, following Judge Burke’s announcement that he would be taken immediately to jail to await his sentencing, “the producer seemed stunned and refused to move.”
