NEW YORK: Harvey Weinstein’s legal team filed an appeal, asserting that he did not receive a fair trial in his 2022 Los Angeles conviction for rape and sexual assault, which resulted in a 16-year prison sentence.
This charm, submitted to California’s next region court of appeal, follows the overturning of his major 23- year# MeToo conviction in New York by the state’s highest court six weeks earlier.
The charm contends that the trial judge erred by omitting proof that the European model and actor who was found guilty of rape had a physical connection with the producer of a film festival that brought Weinstein and the lady to Los Angeles at the time of the alleged incident.
According to Weinstein’s attorneys, the judge denied him “his constitutional right to a defense and caused a miscarriage of justice.”
The trial judge erred, according to Weinstein’s attorneys, by allowing the jury to hear about his previous, now-overturned conviction in New York and by allowing testimony from women regarding alleged assaults against whom he was not accused, giving the jury unfair bias. This kind of testimony also contributed to the overturning of his conviction in New York, where he is still being held as Manhattan’s prosecutors prepare for a retrial.
The introduction of this excessive, cumulative, and remote evidence of prior sexual assaults “merely signaled to the jury that the defendant was a bad man who should be found guilty of something, regardless of whether the prosecution established its case,” according to the filing.
Harvey Weinstein was convicted of the assault on Evgeniya Chernyshova in his California trial, but he was charged with sexually assaulting four women. Weinstein unintentionally showed up in her hotel room during the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival, according to Christineshova.
Weinstein’s legal team contends that Superior Court Judge Lisa B. Lench wrongly barred them from presenting Facebook messages as evidence, which they argue would have demonstrated that Chernyshova and Pascal Vicedomini, the festival’s founder, were not merely friends and colleagues, as they testified, but had a sexual relationship. These messages, in the defense’s opinion, would have demonstrated that both were lying under oath and supported the claim that Vicedomini and Chernyshova were sleeping with each other during the alleged attack.
These arguments echoe those made in Judge Lench’s prior rejection of a motion for a new trial before sentencing.
Since then, Weinstein has engaged appellate attorneys, including Jennifer Bonjean, a Chicago lawyer known for her successful appeal that saw Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction overturned in Pennsylvania.
Chernyshova was only identified as Jane Doe 1 at the trial, but she later admitted to being Jane Doe 1 and gave her consent to being named in Associated Press reports through her attorney.
” Weinstein’s appeal makes the same tired arguments that he previously made multiple times, without success, to the trial court”, Chernyshova’s attorney, David Ring, said in an email Friday. We are of the strong opinion that the trial court properly scrutinized the evidence and rendered its evidentiary judgments. We are confident that Weinstein’s appeal will be rejected and that he will spend many years in prison.
Three jurors have signed affidavits expressing regret over their unanimous guilty verdict, according to the defense’s appeal brief. According to the brief, these jurors claimed they had no idea that Pascal Vicedomini and Evgeniya Chernyshova were romantically involved. They claimed that their opinion on the alleged rape would have been affected by their relationship’s evidence.
Weinstein’s attorneys also argue that Chernyshova’s lawsuit, filed shortly after the verdict, suggests she may have had financial motives influencing her testimony, and they should have been allowed to question her about these motives during the trial.
The defense had initially filed a notice of appeal in April 2023 and, after several extensions, submitted the brief on Friday. The prosecution has until August 6 to respond.
