Harvey Weinstein is pictured arriving at Manhattan’s criminal court on Monday before jurors reached a verdict in his high-profile rape trial. He was convicted on two counts of rape and criminal sexual assault and faces a possible sentence  of 29 years behind bars

Former Hollywood heavyweight Harvey Weinstein has been found guilty of raping and sexual assaulting two women and now faces a sentence that might see him spending his last days in a cell.
Now a poster boy for the ascendancy of the #MeToo movement, the disgraced Hollywood producer was convicted by a 12-man New York jury on Monday.
The five women and seven men on the panel found the Weinstein guilty of sexually assaulting former production assistant Mimi Haleyi in his apartment in 2006 and raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann in a hotel room in 2013.
Weinstein was acquitted of the two most serious counts of predatory sexual assault, which each carried a potential life sentence. He was also found not guilty of first degree rape in relation to Mann.
He now faces up to 29 years in prison on the two charges.
After the verdict was read out the defendant turned to his defense team mouthing: ‘I’m innocent. I’m innocent. How can this happen in America?”
Judge James Burke ordered Weinstein – who appeared to be editing a script prior to the verdict – to be taken to jail immediately until his sentencing on March 11.
Court officers surrounded Weinstein, handcuffed him and led him out of the courtroom via a side door without the use of the walker he relied on for much for much of the trial.
The judge said he will ask that Weinstein, who had been free on bail since his arrest nearly two years ago, be held in the prison infirmary after his lawyers said he needs medical attention following unsuccessful back surgery. He will likely be held at the grim Rikers Island prison in New York City.
Outside court, Weinstein’s lawyer Rutonno said he took the verdict ‘like a man’ and that they were ‘absolutely appealing’ the conviction.   

‘Harvey is very strong. Harvey is unbelievably strong. He took it like a man. He knows that we will continue to fight for him and knows that this is not over,’ she said.
‘It is absolutely horrible for me to watch my client be taken into custody. We don’t feel good about that at all.
‘Obviously, this is a bittersweet day. We are disappointed. We knew we came in and we were down 35-0 on the day that we started this trial. The jurors came in knowing everything they could know about this case. We couldn’t find a juror who had never heard of Harvey Weinstein.’
Meanwhile, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance praised jurors for their verdict and said Weinstein was finally being held accountable.
He praised the six accusers and the female prosecutor in the case as women who ‘pulled our justice system into the 21st century by declaring that rape is rape and sexual assault is sexual assault no matter what’.
‘Rape is rape whether it’s committed by a stranger in a dark alley or by an intimate partner in a working relationship. It’s rape whether it’s committed by an indigent person or by a man of power, prestige, and privilege,’ he said.
‘Rape is rape whether the survivor report within an hour, year or perhaps never. It’s rape despite the complicated dynamics of power and consent after an assault. It’ rape even if there is no physical evidence and even if it happened a long time ago.
‘This is the new landscape for survivors of sexual assault in America I believe and this is a new day.’
The district attorney abhorred Weinstein as a ‘vicious, serial sexual predator’ who ‘used his power to threaten, rape, assault, trick, humiliate and silence’ victims.
Vance said the DA’s office wasn’t disappointed that Weinstein was acquitted of three of the charges he faced.
‘I am certainly not dissatisfied by the verdict. I think this was a very difficult case, a very challenging case and a case that really moved our understanding of what sexual assault is, where it can occur…’ he said.
‘By no means am I disappointed with the jury’s unanimous statement that Harvey Weinstein is guilty of sexual assault and rape.’
After the verdict, jury foreman Bernard Cody outside court noted that the deliberations were ‘devastating’ for him and that he now just wanted to ‘go home’.   

Sciorra’s allegation was too old to be charged on its own because of the statute of limitations, but jurors had to consider it as the basis of the two counts of predatory sexual assault.

Weinstein victim, former cocktail waitress and aspiring actress, Tarale Wulff seen [photo left in court and right in 2009], testified that Weinstein preyed on her vulnerabilities while pushing the notion that sex could lead to film roles

Three other women – costume designer Dawn Dunning, model Tarale Wulff and actress Lauren Marie Young – were also called to testify during the trial that Weinstein allegedly groped and sexually assaulted them.
Their accusations were not the basis of any charges but they were brought in to help prosecutors show Weinstein had a particular intention or showed a signature behavior pattern when he invited women to meet with him.
During the trial, prosecutors argued he was turned on by the fear in his accusers’ eyes, while his defense team painted the case against him as a ‘sinister tale’ and claimed the allegations were ‘regret renamed as rape’.
Weinstein did not testify during his trial but his lawyers contended that any sexual contact was consensual and that his accusers went to bed with him to get ahead in Hollywood.
The defense seized on the fact that the two women he was convicted of attacking stayed in contact with him through warm and even flirty emails – and had sex with him – well after he supposedly attacked them.
The conviction was seen as a long-overdue reckoning for Weinstein after years of whispers about his behavior turned into a torrent of accusations in 2017 that destroyed his career and gave rise to #MeToo – the global movement to encourage women to come forward and hold powerful men accountable for their sexual misconduct.
Since 2017, more than 80 women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct.
Weinstein now still faces charges in Los Angeles. In that case, announced just as the New York trial was getting under way on January 6, authorities allege Weinstein raped one woman and sexually assaulted another on back-to-back nights during Oscars week in 2013.

Key witness Jessica Mann,  testified that he raped her one morning in March 2013 in a New York hotel room. She gave vivid description of Weinstein’s ‘deformed’ naked body which jurors compared to photos taken by photographers from the DA’s dept of the naked defendant

Jessica Mann, one of the two key accusers in Harvey Weinstein’s case, testified that he raped her twice – in New York and Los Angeles – during an ‘extremely degrading’ relationship with the producer that lasted for years.
Mann told the court that she first met Weinstein at a party in late 2012 or early 2013 after she moved from Washington state to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career but said she didn’t know who he was when he introduced himself.
When he pulled her aside later, he told her he was interested in her as an actress. She  gave Weinstein her number.
When she met Weinstein at a bookstore to learn about movie-business history, Weinstein told her that she ‘looked prettier than Natalie Portman’ and that he wanted her to read for a top role in a vampire film.
Mann said Weinstein started offering her invitations to events and, on one occasion, asked her and her roommate to his hotel suite to give them the vampire script he had been talking about – even though it had already been cast.
She said Weinstein started undressing before going into the bedroom and calling her name. When she went to the bedroom, she said he grabbed her arm, closed the door and started ‘trying to kiss me like crazy’.

After the initial rape Jessica Mann [L-R], said she then started having a twisted relationship with the mogul in which they had multiple consensual sexual encounters because she she ‘felt compassion for him and wanted his approval’ 

Mann said she tussled with him and he grew increasingly angry before saying: ‘I’m not letting you leave until I do something for you’. Mann told jurors that Weinstein then performed oral sex on her. She said she feigned orgasm to get herself out of the encounter.
‘I sort of locked up and got really quiet. I was worried about my friend out there by herself. I faked an orgasm to get out of it. He asked me how it was, if I liked it. I was nervous, so I told him it was the best I ever had,’ she testified.
Mann said she then started having a twisted relationship with the mogul in which they had multiple consensual sexual encounters, including a failed threesome.
‘I was confused after what happened and I made a decision to be in a relationship with him,’ she said. Mann said that while she wasn’t sexually attracted to Weinstein, she felt compassion for him and wanted his approval.
The failed threesome occurred in February 2013 when Weinstein had Mann meet him and actress Emanuela Postacchini at a Los Angeles hotel and he tried to persuade the women to have sex with him.
Mann testified that the rape occurred a month later when she was staying at the Doubletree Metropolitan hotel in Manhattan with friends ahead of a breakfast meeting with Weinstein.
Mann testified that she found a needle in a trash can after and believed, after some research, that he had injected himself with an erection-inducing drug.

Former ‘Project Runway’ production assistant Mimi Haleyi, [photo], accused Weinstein of sexually assault, recounted during her testimony how her body went into violent convulsions as the producer forcibly performed oral sex on her while she had her period at his SoHo apt in 2006

While admitting that she continued to see Weinstein after this incident but tried to avoid physical contact, Mann accused Weinstein of raping her again eight months later when she was working as a hairdresser at a Los Angeles hotel after she told him she was dating an actor.
He flew into a rage and screamed ‘You owe me one more time!’. He told her ‘I don’t have time for games’ before attacking her, she said.
‘Okay, now go have your relationship,’ he told her, according to her testimony.
His apology: ‘I just find you so attractive, I couldn’t resist.’
During her testimony, Mann was asked by a prosecutor to describe Weinstein’s body. She said she didn’t believe he had testicles and his penis looked like a vagina. She also said that when she first saw him naked she thought Weinstein was ‘physically deformed or intersex’ and may have been a burn victim due to ‘extreme scarring’ on his stomach.
The jury were shown naked photos of Weinstein to corroborate Mann’s description of his body. The photos, which were only shown to jurors, were taken by a Manhattan District Attorney’s office photographer on June 18, 2018.
As he left the court that day, Weinstein was asked by a journalist: ‘Were those nude photos of you that the jury looked at?’ Weinstein laughed and turned to one of his lawyers and said: ‘No, it was Playboy’.
Mann who broke down during an intense cross-examination. After losing her composure at one point, admitted during her testimony that she had kept in touch with Weinstein by sending him flattering emails because ‘his ego was so fragile’. She said it ‘made me feel safe, worshiping him in this sense… I wanted to be perceived as innocent and naive.’
During her testimony, Mann was asked by a prosecutor to describe Weinstein’s body. She said she didn’t believe he had testicles and his penis looked like a vagina. The jury were also shown naked photos of Weinstein to corroborate Mann’s description of his body

Weinstein, seen with his now ex-wife Georgina Chapman in 2017, was married at the time

The defense said Mann sent Weinstein warm emails that said things like ‘Miss you, big guy.’ Not once, in more than 400 messages between the two, did the woman accuse Weinstein of harming her, his lawyers said.
Asked why she didn’t break off contact with Weinstein at the first sign of trouble, Mann said she didn’t want to offend him. But defense lawyer Donna Rotunno asked whether it was really because the woman ‘wanted to benefit from the power he had.’
She said her relationship with the then-married Weinstein was more complicated than that but defiantly declared: ‘He is my rapist.’
The defense later called her friend and former roommate, Talita Maia, who claimed Mann didn’t show any signs of distress on the day Weinstein allegedly raped her in New York.
Maia was with Mann in New York and said nothing seemed amiss when they met Weinstein for breakfast after the alleged rape, she testified. She told the jury she spent the rest of that day with Mann and she never mentioned the alleged attack.
Maia said Mann ‘spoke highly’ of Weinstein during her relationship with him, even calling him her ‘spiritual soulmate’ at one point.
‘She seemed to really like him as a person,’ Maia said.

‘I did reject him, but he insisted. Every time I tried to get off the bed, he would push me back and hold me down’.
‘I was crying no, no. I told him I’m on my period. It was as if he didn’t believe me. I said something like where is it then? He literally pulled my tampon out.
‘I checked out and decided to endure it. That was the safest thing I could do.’
Haleyi said she and Weinstein, who had gotten her the job at Project Runway, had sex at a Tribeca hotel two weeks later.
She said she ‘just felt like an idiot’ for letting Weinstein convince her to meet again, but thought seeing him could help her regain power as she tried to make sense of the alleged assault.
She said she didn’t want to be intimate that time but didn’t think Weinstein forced her to have sex.
Weinstein’s lawyers suggested that episode was evidence he didn’t coerce her during the first encounter either.
Haleyi’s former roommate, Elizabeth Entin, later took to the stand to corroborate her testimony about the alleged sexual assault.
Entin said Haleyi had told her about the encounter a short time after it happened. She said Haleyi was anxious and pacing as she recounted telling Weinstein: ‘No. No.’
On cross-examination by Weinstein’s lawyer, Donna Rotunno, Entin recalled thinking at first that it was just ‘stupid’ that Weinstein kept showing up unannounced at their apartment in the East Village.
Entin said they viewed Weinstein ‘as a pathetic older man trying really hard to hit on’ Haleyi.
Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra accused Weinstein of raping her, sending her chocolate penises and Valium – and turned up at her Cannes hotel room with baby oil.
Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra, who was the first accuser to take the stand, was brought in to testify about Weinstein allegedly raping her in her Manhattan apartment in the mid-1990s.
Sciorra told the jury that the burly Weinstein barged uninvited into her apartment in the winter of 1993 or 1994 and raped her after dropping her off from a movie-business dinner with actress Uma Thurman and other industry figures.
He threw her on a bed and forced himself on her as she tried to fight him off by kicking and punching him, she said. Sciorra told the jury that eventually she ‘co
uldn’t fight anymore because he had my hands locked’ and that Weinstein told her he had ‘perfect timing’ after ejaculating on her nightgown.

‘It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake in a way that was very unusual. I didn’t even really know what was happening. It was like a seizure or something,’ she said. ‘I’m not sure if I fainted or fell asleep or blacked out, but I woke up on the floor with my nightgown kind of up and I didn’t know if something else had happened.’
At other points in the 1990s, Sciorra said that Weinstein sent her packages with Valium and a box of chocolate penises and turned up early one morning at her Cannes Film Festival hotel room in his underwear with the body oil and the videotape.
She said he left after she frantically pushed buttons on the room phone to summon help.
Sciorra said that roughly a month later, she ran into him and confronted him about what happened and he replied: ‘That’s what all the nice Catholic girls say.’
She claimed Weinstein then leaned toward her and added menacingly: ‘This remains between you and I.’
‘His eyes went black and I thought he was going to hit me right there,’ Sciorra testified.
Afterwards, she spiraled into cutting herself and drinking heavily, she told the jury.
She said she didn’t tell anyone at first about the alleged rape, not even her brothers, saying: ‘I wanted to pretend it never happened… I wanted to get back to my life.’
Cocktail waitress Tarale Wulff claimed Weinstein masturbated in front of her at a New York club – then raped her in his apartment.
Former cocktail waitress and aspiring actress Tarale Wulff testified that Harvey Weinstein masturbated in front of her while she was working at the upscale New York club Cipriani and later raped her at his New York City apartment in 2005.
She was one of three women brought in to testify about encounters separate from the crimes Weinstein was accused of committing to try to establish his motive and a signature pattern of behavior that could bolster the main accusers’ claims.   

Wulff claimed Weinstein, who she met at the members-only club where she worked, raped her at his New York City apartment after luring her there in 2005 with promises of an audition for a film role.
She described the much larger Weinstein grabbing her by the arm, pushing her onto a bed and spurning her pleas to stop with reassurances that she shouldn’t worry because he’d had a vasectomy.
Wulff, now 43 and a model, said she froze as he continued, thinking that would make it ‘easier to get through, to get past it’.
Dawn Dunning, an aspiring actress, told jurors that Harvey Weinstein put his hand up her skirt and fondled her genitals during what was supposed to be a 2004 meeting about her fledgling career and later tried trading movie roles for three-way sex with him and his assistant.
Dunning told jurors she met Weinstein while waiting tables at a Manhattan night spot where bottle service was a trendy indulgence for the rich and famous.
Weinstein immediately appeared to take an interest in her acting career, she said, and invited her to a lunch meeting where, noting his infamous temper, she said he was ‘on the phone a lot yelling at people’.
Dunning said several meetings followed, including one at a hotel where Weinstein was using a suite as a temporary office when she was 24.
Weinstein led her into a bedroom at one point and put his hand up her skirt, she said.
‘He just started talking really fast. He said, ‘Don’t make a big deal about this. It will never happen again,’ she told the jury.

She said she later agreed to meet Weinstein at a cigar bar but that an assistant took her to a suite where the producer was standing in a bathrobe.
She said Weinstein showed her a contract for three movie roles she would get on the condition she had ‘a threesome with his assistant’.
Dunning laughed thinking he was kidding and had a ‘crass sense of humor.’
‘But when I started laughing, he got really angry and started screaming at me,’ Dunning testified. ‘He said, ‘you’ll never make it in this business, this is how this industry works.’
She said Weinstein claimed the lewd offer was the kind of thing that happened all the time in the film business and that he mentioned the names of several big stars in hopes of convincing her to do it.
Dunning, now 40, said Weinstein went on to namedrop actresses Salma Hayek and Charlize Theron, implying they had done similar things to achieve success – something both women have strongly denied.
Hayek has said she had to fight off Weinstein’s constant harassment and bullying. Theron was upset when some accusers said he implied they had slept together.
Dunning said she didn’t know what Weinstein would do after she laughed off the offer, so she ran for the door and down the hall to the elevator.
‘He was a big guy. He was towering over me,’ she testified. ‘I was really scared.’

Lauren Marie Young, the final accuser at Weinstein’s trial, told jurors he groped her in a Beverly Hills hotel bathroom just days before the Oscars in Feb 2013

Lauren Marie Young, another accuser at Harvey Weinstein’s trial, told jurors he groped her in a Beverly Hills hotel bathroom just days before the Oscars in February 2013.
Young said she first met Weinstein a year earlier in February 2012 when she was invited by a friend to an Oscars party for the producer.
She testified that she met Mexican model Claudia Salinas there and told her about a script she was working on based on her life. Salinas gave her her e-mail address and then a year later asked her to bring her script for a meeting with Weinstein at the hotel where the alleged groping occurred.
‘I was excited. I got ready. I put on my best dress,’ the 30-year-old testified about first connecting with Weinstein at the hotel. ‘I was excited to network and pitch my ideas.’
At some point Weinstein said ‘let’s finish this conversation upstairs’ and she went with him and Salinas, according to her testimony.

Young alleged that Weinstein stripped naked, groped her breast and then masturbated in front of her.
Young said Salinas ‘was standing right there’ when Weinstein was finished and she managed to get out.
Young told the jury that shot Salinas ‘an evil look and I left as quick as I could without saying anything’.
Young described in explicit detail how Weinstein had a ‘disgusting’-looking penis that appeared to be ‘cut and sewn back on’ and that he appeared to have no testicles.
‘His body was hairy, it had moles on his rolls, a disgusting looking penis,’ she told jurors. ‘It had looked like it had been cut and sewn back on, not a normal looking scar from circumcision. Something didn’t look normal and I remember noticing that and I didn’t notice balls in the sack. I just saw a penis.’
In a dramatic moment, the court was shown the lace dress Young claimed she wore the night of that alleged assault.
The dress could potentially be sent for DNA testing for evidence in a separate case against Weinstein in Los Angeles where the incident took place.
Salinas was later called as a defense witness and denied ever locking Young in the bathroom with Weinstein.
‘That never happened,’ Salinas told jurors.