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14 January 20
FOCUS: Ronan Farrow on What the Weinstein Trial Could Mean for the #MeToo Movement
David Remnick, The New Yorker
Remnick writes: "The former film producer Harvey Weinstein is now on trial in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan for first-degree rape, third-degree rape, first-degree criminal sexual act, and predatory sexual assault."
David Remnick, The New Yorker
Remnick writes: "The former film producer Harvey Weinstein is now on trial in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan for first-degree rape, third-degree rape, first-degree criminal sexual act, and predatory sexual assault."
EXCERPT:
The authorities in New York considered charging Weinstein long before this, but did not. What is your analysis of the way Cyrus Vance, Jr., the D.A. in Manhattan, has handled the Weinstein investigations?
Cyrus Vance, Jr., has taken a lot of heat in the past few years for having an extremely conservative posture when it comes to high-profile defendants with vigorous legal teams. Lawyers who work criminal cases in New York have told me that they see a stark division between the D.A.’s charging of regular folks and celebrities. You saw that, for instance, in how Vance dropped the 2011 case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn. And you saw it in the 2015 case of Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, when investigators had a tape of Weinstein admitting to groping and then Vance’s office decided, under heavy pressure from Weinstein, not to proceed. There are cops on the force who call that kind of conservatism “corrupt,” and you can see what they mean. Lawyers for Weinstein, for example, did a lot of smearing of his accuser in the Gutierrez case and a lot of donating to Vance’s campaigns. (Vance has since said he’ll no longer take money from attorneys with cases before him.) What sources in the D.A.’s office tell you when you talk to them about this is that these are pragmatic decisions about the likelihood of winning, which makes sense. When you know that someone has unlimited legal resources and the press is going to be scrutinizing the outcome, you can see how prosecutors would have incentives to be more careful than in a less public and contentious case. Whether that’s sound judgment or corruption or a mix of both, I’ll leave to readers.
We’re already seeing all the dynamics that I just mentioned play out in the current trial. The D.A. was understandably conservative in selecting which charges to bring. And Weinstein has shown his characteristic aggression in chipping away at the case. We reported on how one of the catalysts for the reopening of the Weinstein case was Lucia Evans, whose allegation we reported on in The New Yorker. That was a strong claim in a number of respects, but Weinstein’s legal team deployed some very aggressive tactics to get it dropped, including getting a detective who’d worked the case removed for alleged bias and arguing that his behavior had “tainted” the entire prosecution. Sources in the D.A.’s office still privately say that they found her credible, and essentially dropped her because they were being maximally conservative about safeguarding the charges associated with the other women in the case.
Ronan, we’ve talked about what the Weinstein trial is here in legal terms, in a sense. But what does the trial mean? And how much will the outcome affect its meaning?
Well, I think there’s a constituency of survivors and activists for whom the case carries profound meaning. It’s a test of a lot of systems that have failed a lot of people for a long time. My relationship with it is more reportorial. Any outcome will be revealing about these kinds of cases and our ability to hold powerful people to account in the criminal-justice system. And it’s only one piece of a larger puzzle involving multiple jurisdictions.
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