How soon will he go on trial? It is hard to predict, but it could be more than a year. For starters, a grand jury has yet to indict Mr. Weinstein. That must happen within six months.
.. Why didn’t Mr. Weinstein enter a plea in court on Friday? Mr. Weinstein hasn’t been indicted, so no plea is necessary. Defendants typically do not enter a plea of guilty or not guilty upon being arraigned
.. Will Mr. Weinstein testify? He does not have to and often, if the evidence appears especially strong, the defendant will opt not to take the witness stand. However, if there is one accuser — and it boils down to a “he-said, she-said,” debate — the defendant might choose to make the case a credibility contest and testify to deny the allegations.
.. Who is his lawyer? Benjamin Brafman, a former Manhattan prosecutor, is Mr. Weinstein’s current criminal lawyer. Regarded as one of the sharpest trial lawyers in the city, he has successfully defended a who’s who of influential people, including Sean Combs, the rap star, against gun possession and bribery charges in 2001. In 2011, he fended off a sexual assault allegation made against Dominique Strauss-Kahn
.. Mr. Weinstein has been represented in the past by Elkan Abramowitz, a partner at the law firm Morvillo Abramowitz Grand Iason & Anello, who took up his case in connection with accusations, in 2015, that he had sexually assaulted an Italian model, Ambra Battilana, in Manhattan.
The Rush of Seeing Harvey Weinstein’s Perp Walk
One day in March of 2015, Weinstein invited the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez to his office for a morning meeting
.. To see Weinstein turn himself in on Friday at the same precinct where Gutierrez made her report, in the same neighborhood where he caused so many women anguish and pain, was simply cathartic.
.. For all the handwringing about the mob power of #MeToo, the fact is that most men who have assaulted women will not face criminal charges for doing so.
.. Weinstein had spent time hiding out in Arizona.
.. the news elicited a response similar to the “galvanizing shock” produced in April, when Bill Cosby was found guilty of three counts of sexual assault.
.. is mouth alternated between a grimace and a smirk.
.. Entering the precinct, Weinstein was a spectacle of smugness, as if trying to project the posture of an intellectual dissident.
.. In his hands were three books, two of which have been identified. They were corny totems suggesting, respectively, artistic revolution and false persecution: Todd Purdum’s “Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution,” and Richard Schickel’s biography of Elia Kazan, the Hollywood director who famously “named names” to the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1952.
.. After he turned himself in, Weinstein was made to do a perp walk, the queasy practice meant to emasculate the suspect and flex the prosecutor’s power.
It is a public humiliation, a feast for the kinds of New York tabloids that Weinstein himself once manipulated so ruthlessly.
.. The books he walked in with had vanished. With his head hung low, Weinstein looked small, insignificant.
.. In the Manhattan Supreme Court, prosecutors charged him with two counts of rape and one count of a criminal sexual act.
.. He surrendered his passport and was released on bail
.. “Will the sight of Harvey Weinstein in handcuffs encourage more women to come forward/press charges?”