In the great United States of America, we have a legal precedent that everyone is innocent until proven guilty. But there are exceptions to the rule where the evidence is so overwhelming that we don’t exactly need to wait until the jury hands down its conviction.
Hall of Fame running back O.J. Simpson is the epitome of that example because although he was found not guilty, an overwhelming majority of the country saw the damaging evidence and concluded the obvious. And there’s a similar case, with the same presumption of guilt due to overwhelming evidence, happening right now in New York City.
But now there are bombshell emails in a Clinton’s ally sex scandal that will leave you speechless.
Harvey Weinstein was once one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. The super producer was notorious for buying Oscars, as in, what was rumored what he did for “Shakespeare in Love” in 1998.
It was also rumored that if you bumped heads with Weinstein then he had the power to squash your career. Brad Pitt feared this would happen when he stood up to him in the mid-1990s at the behest of Gwyneth Paltrow who claimed to have been sexually harassed by him multiple times.
But one is about to win the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” and the other, who ironically used to produce all of Quentin Tarantino’s films, is facing life behind bars.
Weinstein has been accused by dozens of women, ranging for sexual harassment to rape, since the early 1980s, and is currently on trial for rape in New York City.
But Weinstein’s lawyers now claim that his accusers sent him intimate and loving emails arguing that any sexual contact was consensual.
In one of the most prominent cases of the MeToo era, his defense team is tasked with making that argument after he allegedly raped a woman in a New York City hotel room in 2013 and allegedly forcibly performed a sexual act on a different woman in his apartment in 2006. Meanwhile, Weinstein was just charged with new sex crimes in Los Angeles, California too.
Their strategy is to discredit the accusers and Weinstein’s attorney, Damon Cheronis, told a Manhattan judge this week, “dozens and dozens and dozens of loving emails to Mr. Weinstein.” In fact, Cheronis also argued that the “Gangs of New York” producer’s alleged victims “also bragged about being in a sexual relationship with him.”
But Judge James Burke barred the defense from using the actual emails in a presentation planned for opening statements but permitted referring to the messages’ “substance and content.”
A different Weinstein defense attorney, Arthur Aidala, wrote in court papers las week, “is magnified tenfold by its dissemination in a city obsessed by news, politics and entertainment, the trifecta that is the Weinstein story,” when asking to move the trial to Albany, the state’s capital.
The judge denied moving the trial.
Meanwhile, Weinstein has alleged health issues and has been seen hobbling into the courthouse. He’s even been seeing using a walker. Nobody knew he could win an Oscar for Best Actor too because it was a bang-up acting job.
It’s a reasonable assertion to presume he’s faking his “hobbling” to gain sympathy, mainly because he was seen at a NYC comedy club a week before the trial started getting around just fine with no limp.
Obviously, the Weinstein’s guilt will be held in the hands of twelve jurors but the rumor that the super producer preyed on young actresses had been floating around for decades.
Even Courtney Love said in a red-carpet interview in 2006, when asked about advice she would give young actresses, saying “don’t go to Harvey Weinstein’s hotel at 3AM.”
