Joe Rogan was eating an elk steak while watching the first installment of Candace Owens’ latest project aiming to exonerate Harvey Weinstein when he came to a realization: He agreed with the far-right commentator.
“I can’t believe I’m on Harvey Weinstein’s side,” he said on a March 22 podcast. “I thought he was guilty of like heinous crimes and then you listen, and you’re like ‘Wait, what? What is going on?’”
The episode nodded to seminal moments in the #MeToo era since Weinstein’s sex crimes conviction in 2020 that have given critics runway to argue that the movement went too far. Johnny Depp’s defamation victory over Amber Heard. Danny Masterson’s mistrial on rape charges (he was later convicted). The Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni saga.
Rogan’s takeaway? “If this happened in the 80s, it probably would have been thrown out,” he said of prosecutors’ case against Weinstein. “But in the #MeToo movement, it was a hot witch hunt.” He and Owens are conducting a growing chorus of skepticism around not only Weinstein’s guilt but also accusations of sex crimes from victims, particularly those whose relationships with the accused fluctuated between forced and consensual sex — a dynamic that some experts say is too messy to secure convictions.
Arthur Aidala, Weinstein’s lawyer, is betting that the climate around #MeToo will play in his client’s favor this time around, or at the very least, not against him. “People are realizing that the phrase ‘believe women’ is an anti-American and anti-ends-of-justice idiotic statement,” he says. “We shouldn’t believe everybody. We should determine given our common sense whether they’re telling the truth.”
On April 22, Weinstein is slated to be wheeled into the 13th floor of the Manhattan Criminal Courts Building from a holding cell for opening statements in what will be his third trial on accusations that he was a sexual predator who wielded his power in the entertainment industry to serially abuse women in his orbit. He’s been charged under two indictments for three sex crimes against Miriam Haley, Jessica Mann and an accuser whose identity has yet to be disclosed to the public and is referred to as complaining witness #3 in court filings.
“In this case, justice has been delayed,” said Lindsay Goldbrum, an attorney for the accuser, on April 15 outside the courthouse ahead of jury selection. “As she has told me her experience and again told the DA her experiences one thing has been crystal clear: that this was not consensual. This was sexual assault with force.”
Harvey Weinstein’s attorney Arthur L. Aidala arrives for Weinstein’s court date at the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse on Wednesday, April 16, 2025 in New York City.
For his latest trial, Weinstein has assembled the who’s who of criminal defense lawyers highly-regarded in their specific areas of expertise. Defending Weinstein means making your case to the press as much as it does a jury. And Aidala, whose clients have included Rudy Giuliani, Roger Ailes and Lawrence Taylor, is something of a specialist in headlining-grabbing media cases, with a weekday radio show, “The Arthur Aidala Power Hour,” to spread his gospel. He has deep ties to the entertainment industry as the last dean of the Friars Club, a stomping ground for Manhattan’s showbiz elite, before it closed last year, and was among Leslie Moonves’ first calls when the former CBS exec was accused of sexual misconduct. Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard Law School professor who made his name taking on unpopular causes and clients as a criminal defense lawyer decades ago, has called Aidala “the new me.”
Sitting next to him will be Michael Cibella, a seasoned trial attorney known for his ability to point out inconsistencies in witness testimony to a jury. Expect him to be aggressive on cross-examination, which will be especially important in what’s become a he-said, they-said case. And rounding out Weinstein’s trial team is Jennifer Bonjean, a combative lawyer who led the effort to overturn Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction and has represented R. Kelly and NXIVM founder Keith Raniere. She’s played the role of overall trial strategist for the defense.
They will face off against Nicole Blumberg, Shannon Lucey and Matthew Colangelo, a former high-ranking Justice Department official who spearheaded the hush money case against President Donald Trump. Unlike the first trial, which was handled by homicide prosecutors, this one is led by the newly-formed special victims division.
The trial is expected to last four to six weeks. It will revolve around allegations from Haley, a former production assistant on Project Runway who alleges that Weinstein forced oral sex on her at his TriBeCa apartment in 2006, Mann, an ex-aspiring actress who alleges that she was raped at a Midtown Manhattan hotel in 2013, and a third anonymous accuser who alleges Weinstein forced oral sex her at a Manhattan hotel in 2006. Unlike the first trial, their accusations will not be fortified by testimony from three women whose allegations didn’t lead to formal charges against Weinstein but claimed they were assaulted by him. By prosecutors’ thinking, this evidence was critical to proving that Weinstein knew that his accusers wouldn’t consent to having sex with him as merely a quid pro quo for advancing their movie careers and had to resort to the use of force.
The introduction of testimony from the women — known as “Molineux witnesses” — was the basis of New York’s highest court last year overturning Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction in a landmark ruling that some called a referendum on the shortcomings of the #MeToo movement. A seven-judge panel of the state Courts of Appeals, in a 4-3 decision that included a sharply-worded dissent, found that the “trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts” in what amounted to an “abuse of judicial discretion” that unfairly biased the jury against Weinstein. In the first trial, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office looked to admit such evidence mainly because Weinstein’s accusers had also had consensual sex with him.
Harvey Weinstein appears in Manhattan Criminal Court for the third day of jury selection in his retrial, on April 17, 2025 in New York City.
“I can’t say I was shocked,” says Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former Manhattan prosecutor who is now a law professor at Northwestern, of the overturning of Weinstein’s conviction last year.
Outside of court, there’s little doubt that Weinstein improperly leveraged his power in Hollywood to manipulate women into sex. Nearly 100 individuals have accused him of abuse. The volume of evidence is staggering, with power players across the industry corroborating accounts of sexual misconduct. At the same time, Weinstein’s alleged crimes against most of those women cannot serve as the foundation of an indictment against the one-time kingmaker. The majority involved allegations of civil sexual harassment rather than assault or rape. Others occurred in California, where the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office would later bring a case, and the rest fell beyond the window to bring charges. The chorus of Weinstein’s condemnation belied the small group of women whose allegations could actually stand at the center of a trial.
So in 2018, with federal prosecutors eyeing a potential case and under pressure by the governor for not pursuing charges years earlier, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office made the gamble that would lead to the overturning of Weinstein’s sex crimes conviction. Without testimony from the three additional women whose accusations didn’t lead to charges, Halim Dhanidina, a former prosecutor who served a nine-year stint as a state and court of appeals judge, observes there’s a steeper hill to climb to secure a conviction this time around. “It’ll have a significant impact,” he says. “The prosecution’s burden is higher. The charges they filed must now be able to stand alone.”
At the heart of Weinstein’s defense: The accusers had consensual and often transactional sex with him to advance their careers. This will be the toughest dynamic the jury will be asked to navigate. Defense lawyers will likely point to Haley and Weinstein having sex two weeks after she was assaulted by him, signing one of her emails to him with “Lots of love.” She said she did so because she “just put it away in a box and pretended like it didn’t happen,” Haley testified during the first trial.
On cross-examination six years ago, Damon Cheronis, one of Weinstein’s former lawyers, characterized Haley as enjoying her sexual encounter with Weinstein when she agreed to meet him in a hotel room. He showed the jury hearts she drew on her calendar in the subsequent days.
“You said you draw hearts to sort of reflect your mood. Is that reflective of your mood on July the 27th, 28th and 29th?” Cheronis asked.
“It may have been,” Haley replied.
Another line of argument defense lawyers are expected to draw from include Mann acknowledging that her three-year relationship with Weinstein included consensual sex. “You don’t tell him you love him in 2016 and you are tired of being a booty call in 2017 and call him a predator in 2020,” Cheronis said, citing messages she sent him after the alleged rape.
Mann testified that she was often manipulated into sex by Weinstein, who exerted immense control over her career. Dawn Hughes, an expert witness on the psychological and traumatic effects of rape, will testify for the prosecution to, in part, explain some of the dynamics that show why some victims of sexual assault behave in the way Mann and Haley did.
“It’s hard for juries to wrap their heads around why they appeared to have, in the aftermath of the assaults, seek him out and have friendly relations with him,” says Matthew Galluzzo, a criminal defense attorney and former lawyer for the New York County District Attorney’s Office. “It’s a hard case for prosecutors. They even get nervous about bringing those types of cases.”
Notably, Weinstein has already served his prison term for the overturned conviction stemming from Mann’s rape charge. He will be credited for that time if the jury convicts again, meaning that it will not have any impact on his sentence. For the most part, his lawyers will look to undermine charges relating to Haley and the third accuser.
Expect credibility to play a vital part in the outcome of the trial, even moreso than in other cases. This was the deciding factor in Depp’s lopsided defamation win in 2022 against Heard on allegations that he was defamed by her op-ed in The Washington Post. Of the $15 million that the jury awarded Depp, $5 million was in punitive damages aimed to punish Heard for especially reprehensible conduct. The verdict indicated that jurors were reluctant to believe testimony from Heard, who broke down in tears on the witness stand when graphically recounting an incident in which she said she was beaten and raped by Depp.
And it wasn’t until the court allowed the prosecution free rein to tell jurors that Masterson drugged his victims — directly clashing with his position that the sex was consensual — that they convicted the actor on charges of rape. Even with that change from the initial trial, which ended in a hung jury, jurors split on a charge relating to Masterson’s former longtime girlfriend.
Aidala figures the tables may have turned this time around. He likes his chances. #MeToo has been “uncovered as not being this perfect movement it was alleged to have been,” he claims. “Harvey was pinned as the poster boy for it.”
That may not change, but he will not have to spend the rest of his life at Rikers Island if he wins this trial. Then all eyes will turn to California.