In the end, Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial can be boiled down to the numbers. Six women testified over four weeks in front of about 70 reporters and 30 public citizens. The now-disgraced movie mogul ate at least two fistfuls of candy in court each day.
The jury, comprised of seven men and five women, took five days to deliberate on a verdict, sending 12 notes to the judge with questions that ranged from asking to leave early that day to re-listening to hours of testimony from three women.
And when the court was finally adjourned, it took two court officers more than three minutes to handcuff Weinstein, lift him out of his seat after he refused to move, and shuffle him into the depths of the century-old Manhattan courthouse to be remanded until his March 11 sentencing.
For five days, the press corps sat in the courtroom staring at the prosecution, defense attorneys, and court officers talking amongst themselves in a vain attempt to find out what the jury was doing in another room. There were several false alarms along the way—all signaled by a loud buzzer that prompted everybody to rush into the courtroom to hear the contents of a note sent to Justice James Burke.
“Fuck me,” I heard Weinstein whisper last week after his walker got caught on the door as he entered the courtroom to hear another jury note.
But despite the constant waiting, reporters in the courtroom were surprised on Monday when the jury came to a verdict—less than two hours after indicating to the judge they may be deadlocked. For a few minutes, Weinstein’s lawyers spoke in hushed tones around the defense table, reporters whispered to each other while simultaneously trying to read their lips, and prosecutors sat staring at the judge.
Burke read the note: “We, the jury, have reached a verdict.”
Most of the 33 days I spent covering what some observers called “the trial of the century” started off cold, dark—and on the particularly bad days, wet.
Reporters began to line up in the cold at 4 a.m. outside the extensive Manhattan Supreme Court complex at 100 Centre Street, trying to nab one of 70 seats allocated to media inside the courtroom.
It wouldn’t be until 9:15 a.m. each day that Weinstein made his appearance, shuffling into Part 99 courtroom on the 15th floor with his wheeled walker, flanked by an army of defense attorneys—the impeccably-dressed Chicago lawyer Donna Rotunno, another well-known Chicago lawyer Damon Cheronis, and Arthur Aidala, a popular New York lawyer who seemed to know everyone in the court complex.
For the first week, Weinstein used an older model walker fitted with two tennis balls. When he upgraded to a newer device, it took him half as long to walk to his place at the defense table. Reporters sometimes missed him entering the room, surprised when they saw him sitting in his seat.
Weinstein arrives at court with his upgraded walker.
Lucas Jackson/ReutersWeinstein would turn around to observe who was there each day to witness the latest chapter in this Hollywood blockbuster. Then an attorney would hand the diabetic 67-year-old candy and mints—usually Mentos, but on the final days of the trial, Starburst.
“I can never tell if he is staring at me, it never seems like he can see that far,” a female reporter said to me one day. “I’m scared to look back, but I’m also scared to look away.”
I agreed, admitting I often found myself making eye contact with the Pulp Fiction producer. One afternoon during the second week of the trial I collided with his walker as I was coming out of the elevator to leave the courthouse for the day. He stared right through me as I apologized and sprinted away.
Unlike the infamous stories of Weinstein and his explosive temper, the man who sat in front of me each day was quiet, usually slow-moving, and always appeared disheveled. It was an odd contrast to the pictures shown to jurors of him laughing, dressed up in sharp suits on red carpets. In court, he seemed unemotional and distant, only engaging with reporters in the brief moments it took to walk to and from the elevator.
“Mr. Weinstein, are you afraid of Chihuahuas?” a reporter asked him one day outside the elevator, after testimony that seemed to imply he was scared of the small breed of dog. Weinstein laughed, smiling at the pack of us trying to snap a photo, before throwing back: “Do I look like I’m afraid of Chihuahuas?”
Fifteen minutes after Weinstein sat down each morning, Justice Burke would appear, usually visibly frustrated as he mediated roiling disputes between prosecutors and the defense—ranging from serious accusations of misconduct and witness violations to brief and overly dramatic piques over personal slights.
Burke had an incredibly difficult job during the trial. He had to understand the gravity of it and the insatiable amount of public attention without allowing lawyers from either side to undermine his authority.
He was curt but would always listen to countless mistrial motions, whether it was Weinstein’s defense arguing that a witness had not been properly vetted or prosecutors slamming Rotunno’s latest media interview as “victim shaming” or “jury tampering.”
But when Burke was over listening to the morning disputes, he would abruptly announce “jury entering” and the courtroom would go quiet immediately, ready for another day of testimony.
Reporting on what happened inside the courtroom was harder on some days, usually depending on how loud and fast witnesses spoke, how intense their testimony was, or whether the court officers kept the windows open.
On days the windows were open, witnesses’ testimony was constantly interrupted by a chorus of piercing sirens from the street below—and sometimes, at least on one occasion, several hours of a man playing the flute.
The open windows also meant the normally stifling pre-war courthouse dipped to freezing temperatures, forcing reporters to don full winter gear.
Officers were militant about enforcing the court’s no cellphone rule. Whenever a witness would describe being sexually abused by the man sitting less than 15 feet away from her, the sound of dozens of keyboards would erupt and officers would prowl the aisles, scanning for anybody violating the rules.
Every day or so, a reporter was caught off-guard and ejected for the rest of the day, no matter what time they arrived in the morning. Each time, it would prompt murmurs amongst the media’s allotted five rows.
One reporter was caught moments after former aspiring actress Jessica Mann shocked the courtroom with a graphic description of Weinstein’s genitals and her “extremely degrading” relationship with the man she said raped her multiple times.
Her testimony, which lasted three days, was complex and difficult to report on. Parts of it caused people in the courtroom to gasp, or even giggle. All Weinstein did, however, was shake his head.
Weinstein is depicted in a courtroom sketch sitting at the defense table reading papers during jury deliberations.
Jane Rosenberg/ReutersUsually, though, Weinstein would spend each day snacking, writing on large yellow legal pads, and dozing off. During deliberations, he would even read books, including one by the social psychology author and New Yorker staff writer Malcolm Gladwell.
As women testified against him, he stared intensely across the courtroom, sometimes at nothing and sometimes at the women. He displayed little emotion—except for Rosie Perez. When she took to the stand to corroborate the evidence of her friend Annabella Sciorra, Weinstein tried to wave to her.
Perez stared back at Weinstein and seemingly ignored his greeting before turning her attention back to the Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi—a Staten Island-born prosecutor who always seemed to know the fine line between pushing a witness further and gently nursing them with kindness.
The trial was a constant grind of sprinting out the courtroom to file stories, eating the same turkey-and-spinach sandwich I made the night before, and learning the hard way not to drink coffee in the afternoon if I wanted to sleep. Going home each day, the battle turned to not thinking about the trial and its implications for the #MeToo movement.
But the hardest part was the waiting.
Nearly five weeks ago, on the first official day of trial, I arrived at about 4 a.m. armed with what I believed were the essentials to pass the time until the courthouse opened four hours later: a book, a portable charger, and a red foldable chair.
The chair was initially beneficial in many ways. It provided me with a little warmth on freezing mornings and sparked conversations with other reporters. We bartered hand and toe warmers for coffee, theorized about the trial as the sun rose, and formed friendships that allowed us to swap glances through hours of harrowing, unrelenting testimony of women detailing assaults and subsequent personal and professional degradation.
“If you give me two hand warmers, I’ll get you the largest black coffee they sell at Starbucks when they open,” one foreign reporter suggested one morning, before laughing: “I feel like I’m in some weird Wild West movie.”
But the chair was not a hit with Manhattan Supreme Court officers, who would grumble when I insisted on lugging the badly folded seat into the security line at 8 a.m. before stashing it next to the slew of photographers parked outside the courtroom behind metal barricades.
Eventually, I stopped bringing the chair when I realized I was being punished for extra baggage by being subjected to a slower security line—a punishment more painful than no sleep.
Once inside, reporters would file into another line that stretched along the narrow courthouse hallway while our toes warmed up, waiting to get an index card with a hand-written number, indicating a place in line and securing a daily spot in the trial.
At about 11:30 a.m. on Monday, a note came to the courtroom to say the jury had reached a verdict. When the loud buzzer went off, reporters assumed it was another question. But when the defense team seemed to be anxiously talking in a huddle and the judge was taking longer than usual to enter the room, one TV network producer tapped my shoulder and whispered: “I’m pretty sure this is it.”
It took about 10 minutes to confirm he was right, when the jury foreman, Bernard Cody, came into the courtroom and read the jury’s decision: Weinstein was guilty of rape in the third degree and a criminal sex act in the first degree. Dressed in a Gucci leather jacket and sunglasses, Cody would later tell a few of us chasing him down the street that the trial “was devastating.”
Weinstein remained completely still as Cody added that the movie mogul was acquitted of the most serious charges against him—predatory sexual assault and rape in the first degree. The movie mogul remained frozen in his place. He stared at each juror as they verbally affirmed a decision that took 22 hours to reach. Guilty.
