For the past two months, the ninth floor of the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center, in downtown Los Angeles, has been a proving ground for some of the most heinous and high-profile accusations to emerge from the #MeToo movement. On one end of the hall, there was Danny Masterson, the TV star and Scientologist, on trial for the rape of three women at his home in the Hollywood Hills. (Masterson pleaded not guilty on all counts.) On the opposite end, the former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein faced charges of sexual penetration by foreign object, sexual battery by restraint, forcible oral copulation, and forcible rape, for incidents that allegedly took place at various Beverly Hills hotels between 2005 and 2013, when, at the height of his career, he was in Los Angeles for business. (Weinstein has pleaded not guilty.)
The exposure of Weinstein as a predator, in the New York Times and The New Yorker, in 2017, helped propel the #MeToo movement—emboldening victims of sexual violence to speak out about their experiences and, in some instances, to seek justice. So Weinstein’s trial in Los Angeles is unavoidably symbolic, a referendum on the abuse of power, the nuances of consent, and the credibility of women, five years after a supposed collective shift in consciousness. According to pool reports, during voir dire, the lawyers questioned potential jurors’ feelings about #MeToo and the phrase “believe all women.” They also wanted to know what the potential jurors already knew about Weinstein, who, in 2020, was convicted in New York of third-degree rape and a first-degree criminal sexual act, and sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. (He has been granted an appeal.) In this trial, four accusers would testify, along with four propensity witnesses—alleged victims of uncharged crimes, whose stories, the prosecution hoped, would establish a pattern of behavior. Weinstein would not testify.
For both sides, Weinstein is the iconic Bad Man—the “monster,” per the prosecution, or the scapegoat, his defense might say. In his opening statement, one of Weinstein’s lawyers, Mark Werksman, argued that the case was not about wrongdoing by Weinstein, but, rather, about regret, recontextualization, and lies. “You will learn that the allegations can be traced directly to a movement called the MeToo movement,” Werksman said. “An asteroid called the MeToo movement hit Earth with such ferocity that everything changed overnight. And Mr. Weinstein became the epicenter of the MeToo movement.”
His metaphor, though mixed, was telling: he describes #MeToo as a destructive external force that cratered his client. Wrong place, wrong time; alas, no one told Weinstein that the rules had changed. This is Weinstein’s umbrella defense. In New York, before sentencing, he addressed the court. “I’m totally confused, and I think men are confused about all of these issues,” Weinstein said.
In the L.A. case, Werksman painted Weinstein’s accusers, four women identified in court as Jane Does No. 1 through 4, as the attention-seeking pick-me’s of a wannabe victim army. The defense claimed that Jane Doe No. 1 and Jane Doe No. 2—she testified in the New York trial, publicly identifying herself as Lauren Young—fabricated their stories outright. Jane Doe No. 3 and Jane Doe No. 4, Werksman said, reframed consensual adult relationships—of the transactional, casting-couch variety—as felonies.
In the case of Jane Doe No. 4, especially, this strains credulity. At the time of her alleged assault, she was an actress and an aspiring producer. Now, through her lawyer, she has identified herself as Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, a mother of four, and a high-profile political spouse, who has directed and produced numerous social-issue documentaries. Her accomplishments and fame resonate awkwardly—Siebel Newsom would seem to be the definition of someone with nothing to gain by speaking out, and a great deal to lose—but Werksman forged ahead, presenting her as an opportunist, adept at climbing the ladder of success. Weinstein’s present disgrace, he suggested, was only the latest Weinstein, Inc., opportunity she’d seized upon for personal glory. “Let’s not beat around the bush here. She’s a very prominent citizen of California,” he said, in his opening statement. “She’s made herself a prominent victim in the MeToo movement. . . . Otherwise, she’d be just another bimbo who slept with Harvey Weinstein to get ahead in Hollywood.”
The Weinstein courtroom was small, with strict rules. No cell phones, laptops, or cameras were allowed, and only the first eleven journalists to show up were granted media passes. (A pool reporter, with a laptop, got a dedicated spot.) I first attended about halfway through the trial. Going through security on the ninth floor, I caught a quick exchange between a court official and a deputy about “our special guest.” Soon, it was clear that Siebel Newsom would be testifying. The benches were filled with Democratic political consultants, blue-suited California Highway Patrol officers, childhood friends of Siebel Newsom, and the actress Connie Nielsen.
Weinstein, who was extradited from a prison near Buffalo to Los Angeles, in July, sat next to Werksman, at the far end of the defense table. He looked wan, swimming in a dark suit. (Werksman had told the court that Weinstein needed suspenders, because his pants wouldn’t stay up.) Weinstein moved his head slowly, squinting, like a creature from the midnight zone, dimly apprehending light. One of his New York lawyers described him as “almost technically blind,” but it was clear that Weinstein could still sense a star in his midst. When Siebel Newsom walked in, queenly, in an elbow-length camel coat and an electric-blue dress, he turned, and his eyes followed her to the witness stand. Siebel Newsom was shaken and crying almost from the start. Marlene Martinez, one of the deputy district attorneys, asked her if she saw Weinstein in the courtroom. “Yeah,” she whispered, gesturing loosely in Weinstein’s direction before breaking down in tears. “He’s wearing a suit, and a blue tie, and he’s staring at me.”
In 2005, when Siebel Newsom met Weinstein at the Toronto International Film Festival, she was thirty-one years old, a graduate of Stanford and Stanford’s business school who had been a starter on the women’s junior national soccer team and worked in Botswana for Conservation International before deciding to act professionally. “He was, like, the kingmaker,” she said. “I was a working actress. I had little roles, guest-starring roles on a couple of TV shows and some independent films.” In Toronto, she said, Weinstein approached her at a party. “He wanted to know who I was, and what my name was, and why I was there,” she said. Because she had some film projects she wanted advice on, she agreed to meet him at a bar later, bringing along a friend. At the bar, Weinstein seemed genuinely interested in her work. “He was charming,” she said. “He treated me initially like he was really curious about me and my career. Maybe flattered is how I felt?”
The next time she saw him was when he came through Los Angeles, after he’d been in England for a smoking-cessation program. She said that he called her and told her he had a gift for her, could he come by? She was living in West Hollywood at the time, and had friends over. “He showed up in a big black S.U.V. at my little home,” she said. The gift was a book about Louis B. Mayer. “He was very proud of the book. I guess maybe this was a mentor of his. And ironically, Louis B. Mayer was a sexual predator.” The defense objected and made a motion to strike the comment from the record, which the judge granted.
Weinstein, Siebel Newsom testified, asked her to meet him at the Peninsula Hotel, to discuss her projects. She put on a wraparound dress, her “uniform for auditions,” and reported to the bar. When she arrived, she said that she got a message from an assistant saying the meeting would take place in Weinstein’s room. She should come up. She did, finding herself in an opulent suite, with a bucket containing what looked to her like a bottle of champagne. Weinstein, she said, rushed into the room, and as he did she heard other voices—assistants and colleagues, presumably—saying, “Let’s go, everybody out.” She was left alone with him.
The hours that followed, in her description, were harrowing in the extreme. Weinstein, who was in a suit, excused himself, saying that he needed to get more comfortable. Soon, she heard him calling for help. She found him in a bathroom, in a bathrobe. He was bent down, and at first she thought that he was hurt; he was masturbating, she said, and grabbed her, trying to get her to touch him. She was scared, she said, but “I was, like, ‘Please don’t, please don’t, it’s O.K.’ I remember getting kind of rattled. I was just, like, ‘Please don’t.’ ”
They ended up in a seating area, where he launched into a diatribe about his childhood, his mother, his brother. “It was me, me, me,” she said. “He talked about his ex-wife and how I reminded him of her.” Siebel Newsom remembers telling him about the death of her sister when they were both children, “to get him to slow down and understand that I was a human and not this object.” She said, “I was trying to make him see me as someone who had my own trauma, as a kid.” Instead, he began to browbeat her about the rituals of the casting couch, invoking the names of other actresses. “I was so exhausted,” she said. “It was like mental jujitsu, trying to convince him that I was human and that I was a nice girl.” Then, she said, he maneuvered her into a bedroom, pushed her against the bed, and started groping her and touching himself again, despite her resistance. There was no mistaking her attitude. “I’m trembling,” she said. “I’m like a rock. I’m frigid. This is my worst nightmare. I’m just this freaking blow-up doll he’s just trying to masturbate off of.” She was shaking and crying, she said, as he raped her.
Afterward, because she was afraid he would try to enter her again, she touched him, and made sounds so that he would finish and she could leave. “I just wanted to get the fuck out of there,” she told the court. “Excuse my language. I’m sorry. I just wanted to get out.” She said that she grabbed her underwear; her wraparound dress was still on. She recalled that Weinstein’s parting words, seemingly designed to further humiliate her—a mockery of the good-girl, type-A Stanford graduate—were, “What will it be like when you introduce me to your dad?”
The question at the trial was: What did Weinstein do? But its subtext is an argument about female ambition: What should a woman want? (And its corollary: What should she get? The follow-on movement to #MeToo in Hollywood was #TimesUp, aimed at fighting gender discrimination across various industries.) Many of Weinstein’s accusers are women who sought access to an industry over which Weinstein held sway, and who continued to strive for it in spite of his alleged abuse. They still wanted the job, the chance, a connection to the person who breakfasted with Jeffrey Katzenberg, and who had commandeered control of their reputations. Should they have had to forsake their careers, along with their bodily autonomy? Two of the witnesses, Lauren Young and Siebel Newsom, said that they went to meetings with Weinstein, script in hand, pitch in mind, to discuss projects—and ended up the victims of assault. They, like many other Weinstein accusers, kept in touch with him afterward.
Driving away from the Peninsula after the assault, Siebel Newsom said, she began to reframe the encounter. “I remember crying, and telling myself, ‘That didn’t just happen, Jen. It’s O.K. You’re gonna be fine,’ ” she testified. In the morning, she said, Weinstein called, offering help with a role. It would be the casting couch, whether she had consented to it or not. She sent in an audition tape for “The Nanny Diaries.” (She didn’t get the part.) “He had taken a piece of me,” she said. “I was just playing the game. I was just pretending like nothing happened and putting that in a box over here and moving on with my career.”
When Werksman, in cross, pressed her on this point, implying that she was describing a transactional, consensual relationship, she said, “He ruined my life. . . . I was not going to not pursue my entertainment career because of what happened.” She characterized her interactions with Weinstein over the years, including times when she initiated communication, as a form of survival. “Just doing the business thing,” she said.
The stickiest points in her communications with Weinstein revolved around her husband, Gavin Newsom, whom she started dating a year after her encounter with Weinstein at the Peninsula, when he was the mayor of San Francisco. In 2007, it came to light that Newsom, while he was in the midst of a divorce from his first wife, Kimberly Guilfoyle, had had an affair with his campaign manager’s wife. Siebel Newsom reached out to Weinstein, seeking advice about how to deal with the media. She also acknowledged that Newsom’s aides, at her suggestion, had solicited donations from Weinstein, a major contributor to Democratic politicians. Questioned by Werksman, she said that, at the time of these communications, Newsom didn’t know the extent of the alleged assault. She had “dropped hints,” she said, and told her husband that she found Weinstein “sketchy.” Like many of Weinstein’s accusers, Siebel Newsom didn’t tell her story in full until the #MeToo movement began. She testified that her husband had returned a donation from Weinstein after he learned, in 2017, along with the rest of the world, about Weinstein’s mistreatment of women.
Jane Doe No. 3, a massage therapist who was hired to work on Weinstein in 2010 and alleges that he assaulted her on more than one occasion, testified that she’d kept the attacks a secret from her fiancé. “If I told my fiancé that I was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, he would have made me go to the cops,” she said. “If I did that, I would have been alone, on trial against him. I would have been the massage therapist that couldn’t be alone with a high-profile client because I would accuse them of sexual assault.” When the defense told her that no one had forced her to go to Weinstein’s hotel room on a subsequent occasion, when she had set up a business meeting between Weinstein and a male friend of hers, she parried, “My ego forced me to.” Sometimes, accusers said, seeking him out meant being assaulted again.
After Jane Doe No. 3’s first encounter with Weinstein, when, she said, he grabbed her breast and masturbated in front of her, he allegedly told her that now they were “friends.” He made her an offer from left field: he would get her a deal to write a book about massage. (Nothing came of it; she is, she admitted, a terrible writer.) One of the propensity witnesses, Natassia Malthe, a Norwegian model and actress, testified that the day after Weinstein allegedly raped her in her hotel room in London, a script for a Weinstein Company movie musical appeared on her nightstand. Weinstein, she said, was known as “one-phone-call-away Harvey, meaning he could make you or break you.” Malthe, a frank and salty witness—Weinstein, she said, was a “fat fuck”—suggested that, having already been raped, she “wanted to make the best of this situation.” She took voice and dance lessons, and made a CD of her part. When she went to drop it off, she said that Weinstein tried to embroil her in a threesome. She said, “He has you by the fucking throat, knowing that, if you don’t comply, that your career is down the drain, knowing that this thing you’ve worked on for months . . . and that’s not right.” (Weinstein’s lawyers argue that Malthe’s relationship with Weinstein was consensual.)
If Malthe’s and other similar accounts are true, this is Weinstein at his most diabolical: violating women and then dangling phantom go-nowhere gigs to create an elaborate fiction of an exchange for some future defense, or perhaps to better defend his own conscience from misgivings and moral pangs.
Last week, I was back in court as closing arguments began. Gloria Allred was in the gallery, wearing a burgundy-colored mask and a crisp burgundy suit. She represents Young, as well as Malthe and Jane Doe No. 5, who was ultimately not included in the case, resulting in four counts being dropped. Seven counts remained: one count of sexual penetration by foreign object; two counts of sexual battery by restraint; two counts of forcible oral copulation; and two counts of forcible rape. The defense had characterized the prosecution’s case as a fire hose of allegations; now it claimed that the testimony from the prosecution’s witnesses could be reduced to one short sentence: “Take my word for it.” (This is, technically, a permissible basis for conviction: the jury was told that a single credible witness was enough to find Weinstein guilty on a given count.)
Delivering the closing argument for the defense, Werksman’s partner Alan Jackson described Weinstein’s accusers as “fame and fortune seekers”—back then, when they’d wanted to advance professionally, and now. He complimented Siebel Newsom on her acting job. “She’s given the performance of a lifetime,” he said, as if, having lost her part in “The Nanny Diaries,” she’d landed the lead in “The Weinstein Trial.” Will a jury find that a woman’s desire to work undermines her account of being sexually violated in the process? Will it believe that these women, participating in a criminal case, are gleefully jumping on what he called the “2017 dogpile”?
Arguing that Jane Doe No. 3 and Siebel Newsom both engaged in consensual relationships with Weinstein for their own benefit (“He benefitted, and she benefitted”), Jackson said that after 2017 they were “desperate to relabel their relationships with Harvey Weinstein.” Siebel Newsom, he said, “cannot square in her mind the idea that she’s a successful, well-educated, well-bred, refined woman who had consensual sex with Harvey Weinstein in exchange for opportunity and access.” It was “transactional sex,” he said, and Siebel Newsom had buyer’s remorse. But, he said, “regret is far from rape. You don’t get to rewrite your own history, no matter who you’re married to.” After other women came forward to accuse Weinstein of horrible crimes, Siebel Newsom cried #MeToo, Jackson said, “not because it was true, but because it was trendy.”
What exactly can the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein accomplish for a movement? In a sense, Weinstein is the wrong test for #MeToo because of his symbolic value. In the public imagination, he has been the measure of awfulness, the elephant in the room; when women started talking about him, the conversation finally broke wide open.The trial added oily layers to the portrait of the consummate Bad Man. He was overweight, with blackheads on his back. His stomach was hatched with stretch marks. His penis was “weird,” “fishlike,” “messed up,” according to Siebel Newsom. At one point, his scrotum had become gangrenous, causing his testicles to be relocated to his inner thighs. He was described as aggressive, single-minded, utterly focussed on himself and his own needs. But the extreme and shocking nature of the allegations against him also pose a challenge to the movement. Few men live up to the tales of his egregious violations. Was Louis C.K. that bad? He was no Harvey Weinstein.
On Friday, the jury in Los Angeles began deliberating. If they find Weinstein not guilty—and if his New York conviction is overturned—it will be tempting to conclude that #MeToo is over. But, even if he is convicted, some may reach the same conclusion. The Bad Man has been vanquished, the monster has been locked away, and we can all move on. Like anything burdened with a hashtag, #MeToo, as such, was a trend. Fashion is designed to become unfashionable, and a hashtag is destined for obsolescence. A conviction, though, can’t absolve a society for its injustices. Weinstein should be held accountable for whatever he did, but he can’t be allowed to be a scapegoat.
On the day closing arguments started, I happened to step out of the courtroom while something was happening at the far end of the hall. There was Danny Masterson and his wife, Bijou Phillips, in a swirl of people, looking jubilant. The judge had declared a mistrial, and he walked out of the courthouse a free man. ♦