Weeks after Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction was overturned in New York, the disgraced movie mogul filed an appeal to overturn a separate rape and sexual assault conviction in California.
Weinstein filed his appeal in the Los Angeles case with the 2nd District Court of Appeal on Friday, according to court documents obtained by NBC News. He asks for a new trial.
“Harvey Weinstein was tried by a system designed to get him at any cost. This appeal highlights nearly a dozen areas of blatant legal missteps that violate his right to due process,” Weinstein’s publicist Juda Engelmayer said in a statement to NBC News on Thursday. “We know he has a solid case here.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lawyers for Weinstein claim on appeal that Weinstein was “wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting Jane Doe 1.”
The former Hollywood producer was found guilty in 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexually assaulting a woman known as Jane Doe 1, referred to as JD1 in appeal documents, during the trial in Los Angeles. Weinstein is serving a 16-year prison sentence resulting from that conviction.
He was found not guilty of sexual assault by coercion against a woman known in court as Jane Doe 2. In the same case, the jury could not make a decision on three sexual assault charges Weinstein faced, involving two more women who were known as Jane Doe 2. as Jane Doe 3 and Jane Doe 4.
The LA conviction came nearly three years after his trial in New York, in which he was convicted in 2020 of two crimes: rape in the third degree and criminal sexual act in the first degree.
Those charges in New York were overturned in April after an appeals court ruled that the judge in the Weinstein case had biased himself with inappropriate rulings, including allowing women to share testimony and accusations that were not part of the case. Weinstein was serving a 23-year sentence in a New York prison.
Weinstein, who is being held on Rikers Island in New York, could face a possible retrial in that state. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has indicated he is interested in retrying the Weinstein case, but no official trial date has been set.
Lawyers for Weinstein argue in the California appeal that he was not given a “fair opportunity to defend himself against JD1’s allegations,” and given the close nature of the case, the jury likely would have acquitted him because “the plaintiff’s case with regard to JD1 was weak. and based in part on evidence they knew to be false.”
“The jury was misled about the veracity of JD1 and was not allowed to consider seminal evidence that pointed to the defendant’s innocence and contradicted the prosecution’s theory of guilt,” Weinstein’s attorneys wrote in the appeal.
The appeal reiterates the nature of the allegations against Jane Doe 1, who alleged that Weinstein showed up uninvited to her hotel room and “raped her for over an hour” while she was visiting for the 2013 Los Angeles Italia Film Festival, the document said . .
Jane Doe 1 claimed at trial that the only person who knew where she was staying at the time was the founder and host of the event, who the appeal alleges was a friend of hers.
The appeal states that the plaintiff “theorized” that the founder “lured the defendant to his festival by offering JD1 as sexual bait and then provided her hotel information to the defendant.”
Weinstein’s lawyers say this story is “false.” The “flaw,” they argue, is that Jane Doe 1 and the event’s founder were actually in a romantic relationship, so it would have been unlikely that the founder would have introduced her to Weinstein if they were “in the throes of their own torrid feelings’. affair.”
Weinstein’s lawyers claim the accuser could not explain why Weinstein targeted Jane Doe 1 or how he could have found her without the help of the event organizer.
The appeal states that Weinstein’s Sixth Amendment right to present a defense was violated because the defense could not use evidence proving their romantic relationship.
Further evidence about Jane Doe 1’s whereabouts at the time she said Weinstein raped her was also withheld, the appeal alleges. Based on reports that could not be presented in court, Weinstein’s lawyers say they believe Jane Doe 1 was with the festival’s founder at the time.
“When the court purged the messages, giving the jury the false impression that JD1” and the founder “were just ‘friends,’ it undermined the defendant’s defense, disrupted his ability to prove his innocence, and left the prosecution allowed to put forward a case. story that everyone in the courtroom, except the jury, knew was false,” the appeal states.
NBC News has contacted the founder for comment.
In addition to the other grievances detailed in the appeal, Weinstein’s attorneys allege that they were prohibited from questioning Jane Doe 1 about her financial situation, including fears that she would be evicted from her home. The appeal alleged that the jury “had another false impression of JD1, namely that she had no financial interest in the outcome of the case.” It stated that she stated that she would not sue Weinstein, which she did a month later, according to the appeal.
The appeal says that “three of the jurors seated in the defendant’s trial immediately regretted signing a guilty verdict when they learned that they were denied critical evidence proving that JD1” and the event’s founder “had an ongoing romantic relationship and had been lied to,” and that the jurors “explained that if they had had access to such evidence, it would have changed their calculation of whether rape occurred.”
“Undermining defendant’s defense, as the court did, deprived defendant of his constitutional rights to present a defense and led to a miscarriage of justice,” the appeal states.
Weinstein’s lawyers also said that jurors were told during selection that the mogul had previously been convicted of rape in New York, arguing that a “fair and impartial trial was doomed from the start.” In addition, they said, the prosecutor was allowed to present “evidence of twelve uncharged sex crimes, some of which were decades old,” that “added nothing to the jury’s assessment of whether the prosecutor had met his burden on the charged counts.” ”
“The introduction of this excessive, cumulative, and distant evidence of prior ‘sexual assaults’ simply signaled to the jury that the defendant was a bad man who should be convicted of something regardless of whether the prosecution proved its case,” attorneys for Weinstein in the profession.
Weinstein’s team said he “is entitled to a new trial where his constitutional rights are guaranteed, where he is allowed to provide evidence of his innocence, and where his conduct – not his character – is tried.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
