SANTA MONICA (CNS) – A judge has granted Harvey Weinstein an expedited trial of the lawsuit filed by the same accuser who helped bring about the disgraced producer’s criminal conviction for a 2013 sexual assault at a Beverly Hills hotel.
The plaintiff is identified as Jane Doe No. 1 in the Santa Monica Superior Court lawsuit filed in February 2023, alleging sexual battery, false imprisonment, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. In November, Weinstein’s lawyers filed court papers with Judge Elaine W. Mandel noting the producer’s age, 72, and his health in asking for a speedy trial. On Tuesday, the judge granted the motion and set the trial for March 24.
“Defendant’s health is such that preference is necessary to prevent prejudice,” the judge’s clerk wrote in a minute order.
Weinstein is currently imprisoned in New York, which his lawyers noted in their argument in favor of an expedited trial.
“Even in the absence of a medical diagnosis, Mr. Weinstein would be entitled to trial preference, since it is well established that incarceration shortens life expectancy, and he has already outlived the average life expectancy of a prisoner in the United States,” Weinstein’s lawyers argue in their heavily redacted court papers.
As the sole defendant in the case, Weinstein has a significant interest in the case because he faces a potential judgment of millions of dollars based on accusations of sexual assault of which he is “innocent,” according to Weinstein’s attorneys’ pleadings.
In December 2022, Weinstein, was convicted in Los Angeles Superior Court of three of the seven criminal counts he was facing — forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object — all of which related to Doe. The attack occurred on or about Feb. 18, 2013, in a Beverly Hills hotel room.
Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison in February 2023.
According to Doe’s suit, she attended a film festival and alleges that Weinstein came to her hotel room unexpectedly after she attended events that day.
“After he was done raping her, he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary happened and left,” the plaintiff’s court papers allege.
Doe did not report the attack until 2017, when she had a talk with her daughter, during a time when Weinstein was at the forefront of the #metoo movement, according to her attorneys’ court papers.
Weinstein, who is appealing his Los Angeles case conviction, underwent emergency heart surgery in New York in September. New York prosecutors want to retry him for alleged sex crimes. Weinstein had been convicted in that state and sentenced to 23 year in prison, but the case was overturned by an appeals court.
Recent Comments