As Weinstein Awaits Prison, Prosecutors Detail 40 Years of Accusations

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/nyregion/harvey-weinstein-sentencing.html

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Manhattan prosecutors on Friday urged the judge who will sentence the once-powerful film producer Harvey Weinstein to consider what they said was a four-decade history of sexual assaults against women for which he had never been charged.

A jury convicted Mr. Weinstein last week of rape and criminal sexual assault after a trial that was widely viewed as a milestone in the #MeToo movement. He faces up to 29 years in prison when he is sentenced on Wednesday.

The crimes Mr. Weinstein was found guilty of involved attacks on two women: a production assistant who testified that he forced oral sex on her at his loft in 2006, and an aspiring actress who accused him of raping her at a Manhattan hotel in 2013.

But in a sentencing memorandum in which they argued for a substantial prison term, prosecutors detailed a litany of sex crimes and instances of sexual harassment that they said Mr. Weinstein had committed starting in 1978.

Joan Illuzzi, the lead prosecutor, said the list of assaults detailed in the memo “show a lifetime of abuse toward others, sexual and otherwise.” She urged Justice James A. Burke to impose a sentence that reflected what she said was Mr. Weinstein’s “total lack of remorse for the harm he has caused.”

Ms. Illuzzi also asked Justice Burke for a sentence that sent a message to others that sexual assault in the workplace would be prosecuted and that offenders would be punished.

It was, she wrote, “totally appropriate in this case to communicate to a wider audience that sexual assault, even if perpetrated upon an acquaintance or in a professional setting, is a serious offense worthy of a lengthy prison sentence.”

The filing suggested that a two-year investigation into Mr. Weinstein by the Manhattan district attorney’s office had gone far beyond the evidence presented at his trial and had delved into several accusations that did not result in charges against him.

The offenses listed in the document included Mr. Weinstein’s hiring of a private intelligence firm to threaten people who planned to speak to reporters about him and accusations that he had sexually assaulted several women who sought acting work.

The attacks, prosecutors said, were frighteningly similar to those described by six women who testified against Mr. Weinstein.

Ms. Illuzzi wrote that the acts recounted in the sentencing memo showed that Mr. Weinstein had “displayed a staggering lack of empathy, treating others with disdain and inhumanity” throughout his professional life and that he had “consistently advanced his own sordid desires and fixations over the well being of others.”

Donna Rotunno, Mr. Weinstein’s lead defense lawyer, declined to comment on the filing on Friday.

Ms. Illuzzi wrote in the filing that Mr. Weinstein had “sexually violated many women,” starting in the 1970s, by trapping them “into his exclusive control.”

In 1978, the filing said, Mr. Weinstein forced himself sexually on a woman who worked for his music company in Buffalo, N.Y., attacking her while they shared a hotel room on a business trip to New York City. Three years later, the filing said, Mr. Weinstein pushed into the home of a young actress and raped her against a coat rack.

Hope D’Amore, the woman who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted her in 1978, welcomed the prospect of him going to prison for many years.

“The way I look at it I’ve had a 40-plus year sentence thanks to Harvey Weinstein,” she said in an interview on Friday. “It wouldn’t bother me in the least if he got the maximum sentence. This has been a lifelong struggle for me.”

Ms. Illuzzi listed a dozen other accusations of sexual misconduct that women had made against Mr. Weinstein.

The filing said that in the 1990s a 19-year-old employee of Mr. Weinstein’s said he had sexually assaulted her in a hotel room during a business meeting; that a second 19-year-old woman had accused him of asking her to remove her top as he lay naked on a hotel room bed; and that a third woman had said he forcibly kissed her on an elevator in New York City after interviewing her for an internship at his company.

Another woman told prosecutors that Mr. Weinstein had chased her around his apartment in 2005 after coercing her into stripping down to her underwear, then hid her clothes and masturbated on her, Ms. Illuzzi wrote.

Mr. Weinstein was also accused of trapping a woman in a restaurant kitchen, then masturbating and ejaculating into a potted plant, the memo said. In 2010, the filing said, he trapped a masseuse in a bathroom, masturbated and groped her breasts.

Ms. Illuzzi said that he had assaulted three other women in 2011, two in New York City and one in Beverly Hills.

In 2014, she wrote, Mr. Weinstein lured a woman to his hotel room after the Cannes Film Festival in France by saying that he planned to review her film reel. Instead, the memo said, Mr. Weinstein tried to undress the woman, masturbated and forced her hand onto his penis.

Ms. Illuzzi also wrote that Mr. Weinstein had gone to great lengths to cover up his behavior, and she quoted several former employees of his companies to that end.

One executive told prosecutors that Mr. Weinstein had instructed him to lie for him about his abuse of women after The New Yorker published an exposé about the producer in 2017.

Other former employees who were quoted in the memo described Mr. Weinstein as a bully with a volcanic temper who berated people and had physically assaulted workers and business partners, including his brother, Bob Weinstein.

One longtime executive at the Weinsteins’ company, Miramax, said that Harvey Weinstein had “zero compassion, empathy, civility,” the memo said. Another woman who worked in the company’s Los Angeles office for four years told prosecutors that Mr. Weinstein “got a lot of joy by demeaning people.”

Prosecutors also cited Mr. Weinstein’s use of private investigators with the Black Cube firm “to discredit and shame” his sexual assault victims.

“Multiple people,” the sentencing memo said, had told prosecutors that Mr. Weinstein “bragged about his ability to get people killed,” and that he had warned one of his victims, Jessica Mann, that he could send men with baseball bats to assault her father and that he had the same thing before.

Ms. Illuzzi did not say in the memo how much prison time prosecutors were seeking for Mr. Weinstein. After spending 10 days in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital Center, he is in an infirmary unit at the Rikers Island jail complex until his sentencing.