Harvey Weinstein will not face trial again on rape charges in Los Angeles
Los Angeles County prosecutors will not seek to retry Harvey Weinstein for the sexual assault of two women, including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, after a jury hung on those charges last year, prosecutors announced Tuesday.
After a two-month trial, in which he was accused of raping four women in hotels between 2004 and 2013, Weinstein was convicted in December of sexually assaulting an Italian model and actress after a film festival in Beverly Hills.
The jury acquitted Weinstein of assaulting a massage therapist and was deadlocked on charges that he assaulted Lauren Young, a former actress who also testified against him in New York, and Siebel Newsom, who was an up-and-coming actress when she alleged that he attacked her in a hotel room in the mid-2000s.
The Times does not normally name victims of sexual assault, but Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Young have testified against Weinstein in public courts before or have been identified in the media.
Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in a California prison last month. Combined with the 23-year sentence he received after being convicted of rape in New York in 2020, the disgraced Hollywood mogul, who is 70 and in failing health, is almost certain to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Young appeared in court on Tuesday and asked prosecutors to review his case. Siebel Newsom, however, submitted a written statement asking the district attorney’s office not to hold a second trial of her accusation.
“The first partner’s primary intention in coming forward was to ensure that Weinstein spent the rest of his life in prison. While the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charges related to his experience, we believe his testimony, along with the testimonies of other courageous victims, led to Weinstein’s conviction and the 16-year sentence he faces in California after serve his sentence. New York Judgment,” his attorney, Elizabeth Fegan, said in a statement.
“Had the court not handed down a proper sentence,” Fegan said, “my client would have been ready to support prosecutors if they chose to retry Weinstein, even considering the enormous emotional toll it would inflict on her.”
Deputy Dist. Attorney Paul Thompson, the lead prosecutor in the case, said Weinstein would only have faced an additional year in prison if convicted of the charge related to Young’s indictment.
Weinstein will now be back in custody in New York, where he is still appealing his conviction, according to his lawyer, Mark Werksman.
Juda Engelmayer, Weinstein’s spokeswoman, called the prosecutors’ decision Tuesday “an important step toward Harvey Weinstein’s appeal in Los Angeles.”
“Now, he and his team can focus only on the Jane Doe 1 claims, for which there is widespread support and corroborating evidence for Harvey’s claims that it never happened,” Engelmayer wrote in an email.