Alleged sexual predator Harvey Weinstein went on trial in New York on Wednesday, more than two years after multiple women came forward to accuse him of rape and other crimes, simultaneously launching the #MeToo movement.
Weinstein, 67, was once among the most powerful film producers in Hollywood history, having brought to the screen such Oscar-winners as “Pulp Fiction,” “Chicago,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “The King’s Speech.”
“Though dozens of women have accused Weinstein of sexually harassing or assaulting them over the years, the New York charges are limited to two allegations: that Weinstein raped a woman in a New York City hotel room in 2013 and forcibly performed oral sex on another woman in his apartment in 2006,” reports the Associated Press.
Prosecutor Meghan Hast gestured toward Weinstein as she gave her opening statement.
“The evidence will be clear that the man seated right there was not just a titan in Hollywood, but a rapist,” she told the jury, before laying out graphic details of the incidents on which their case against Weinstein are based.
“Before one attack, she said, Mr. Weinstein injected erection medication into his genitals,” reports the New York Times. “On another occasion, he showed up uninvited outside the hotel room of the actress Annabella Sciorra … in his underwear, with baby oil in one hand and a videotape in the other.”
The Times says the trial “will hinge on the testimony of six women, four of whose allegations are too old to prosecute in court. But the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is handling the case, is hoping that its courtroom presentation will show that Mr. Weinstein engaged in a pattern of sexual predation.”
Weinstein’s lawyers insist that all of the accusers engaged in consensual sex with him — or, as the AP puts it: “transactional relationships meant to advance their own careers.”
Before the lawyers began their statements, Judge James Burke told the court that Weinstein’s trial could take more than a month.
“Judging from the arduous two weeks of jury selection, it could be a hotbed of protests and intense media coverage,” says the AP. “In a failed last-minute push to get the trial moved, Weinstein’s lawyers said a mob’s chants of ‘The rapist is you!’ at street level could be heard in the courtroom, 15 floors above.”
