Grotesque Harvey Weinstein should be cleared of charges of raping an aspiring actress — even if Manhattan jurors are skeeved out by the convicted sex pest, his lawyer argued Tuesday.
“We’re not here asking you to like Harvey Weinstein,” the despised defendant’s lawyer, Jacob Kaplan, said during opening statements at the third city sex-crimes trial involving the decrepit, deathly pale, wheelchair-bound, 74-year-old former film bigwig and his accuser, Jessica Mann.
“This case is about proof, not popularity,” Kaplan said.
But prosecutors again portrayed the onetime Hollywood kingmaker as a predator who lured vulnerable women into his twisted web with promises to advance their careers, before sexually assaulting them.
“This case will come down to power, to control and to manipulation,” Assistant District Attorney Candace White told jurors — as her boss, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, watched on from the courtroom gallery.
Weinstein, who has been held in city and state custody since his 2018 arrest on various charges, faces one count of third-degree rape for allegedly assaulting Mann in a 2013 encounter at a Manhattan hotel.
The disgraced mogul was originally convicted of raping Mann and forcing oral sex on former “Project Runaway” production Assistant Mimi Haley at his first Manhattan sex-crimes trial in 2020.
But New York’s highest court ended up overturning that guilty verdict, so the former Miramax boss — who produced flick hits such as “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction” — was put on trial for the cases a second time last summer.
Jurors at the re-trial convicted him again of the Haley charge but could not decide on the Mann rap after a tumultuous week of deliberations.
So prosecutors are going after him yet again over Mann — hoping the third time’s the charm and will garner them a conviction that sticks.
Mann, now 41, plans to testify about how Weinstein allegedly forced her to have sex at the Doubletree Hotel in Midtown on March 18, 2013 — with her discovering the then-married onetime movie honcho’s gross erection-inducing drug injector needle in the trash afterward.
Weinstein’s lawyers revisited his longtime defense in the case during opening statements — insisting his accusers have been wrongfully re-characterizing “consensual” encounters as sex crimes years later.
“It was her choice to make, and she made that choice over and over again for the next four years,” Kaplan told the jury of seven men and five women about the sex encounters between Weinstein and Mann.
Wearing a dark blue suit and American flag pin and with his tie slightly askew Tuesday, Weinstein flashed a faint thumb’s up to his lawyers and PR rep as court officers rolled him into the room through a side door before the proceeding.
He already faces up to 25 years in prison when he’s sentenced on the charge of forcing Haley into oral sex.
Because the max sentence on the pending third-degree rape charge is just four years comparatively, the outcome of the trial happening now is not expected to meaningfully impact his prison sentence.
Weinstein has separately been convicted of raping an Italian model in California and was sentenced to serve 16 years behind bars in that case.
Despite his guilty verdicts, the jailed ex-tycoon maintains that he never raped anyone.
“I admit my moral failings — I was unfaithful and acted wrongly — but I have never assaulted anyone,” he said at a Manhattan pre-trial appearance in January.
