Prosecutors asked for a September retrial for Harvey Weinstein during a hearing Wednesday in Manhattan, the disgraced movie mogul's first court appearance since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals court last week.
One of Weinstein's accusers, Jessica Mann, is prepared to testify again, prosecutor Nicole Blumberg told the judge, suggesting locking in a date after Labor Day.
Blumberg noted Mann was in the courtroom Wednesday, and said she wants everyone to know that the defendant "may have power" but "she has the truth."
"We believe in this case and will be retrying this case," she said.
Weinstein, wearing a navy blue suit, was seated in a wheelchair at the preliminary hearing. The 72-year-old, who has cardiac issues and diabetes, has been in a hospital since his return to the city jail system Friday from an upstate prison.
In court, his attorney, Arthur Aidala, said he has no concern about his client's mental abilities, describing Weinstein as "sharp as a tack. As sharp as he ever was."
Aidala said his client wants to prove his innocence: "It's a new trial. It's a new day."
In the New York case that is now overturned, Weinstein was convicted of rape in the third degree for an attack on aspiring actor Mann in 2013 and of forcing himself on a TV and film production assistant, Mimi Haley, in 2006. Weinstein had pleaded not guilty and maintained any sexual activity was consensual.
The Associated Press does not generally identify people alleging sexual assault unless they consent to be named, as Haley and Mann have.
Speaking after the hearing, Haley's lawyer, Gloria Allred, said her client still hasn't decided whether she wants to testify at the retrial, noting that doing so at the original trial was traumatizing and painful. Haley was not in court Wednesday, Allred said.
Weinstein was also convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape and is still sentenced to 16 years in prison in California. But he remains in custody in New York and will head back to Manhattan's Bellevue Hospital, where he is expected to stay until his trial, Aidala said.
"He's in constant pain that he's fighting through. He's fighting the best he can," the attorney said, adding that he has nevertheless been reading avidly behind bars, including biographies on Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt.
"Harvey Weinstein was used to drinking champagne and eating caviar, and now he's at the commissary paying for potato chips and M&Ms" but is making the best of it, Aidala said.
On Thursday, the New York Court of Appeals vacated his conviction in a 4-3 decision, erasing his 23-year prison sentence, after concluding a trial judge permitted jurors to see and hear too much evidence not directly related to what he was charged with.
The ruling shocked and disappointed women who celebrated historic gains during the era of #MeToo, a movement that ushered in a wave of sexual misconduct claims in Hollywood and beyond.
More than 67 million people watched Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. That’s way up from June
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.
Tuesday's count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump's and Hillary Clinton's first faceoff in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.
With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticizing ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.
No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there's been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Tuesday's debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden's withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an "excellent" job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said,... Read More