Los Angeles County prosecutors will not seek to retry Harvey Weinstein in the sexual assault of two women, including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, after a jury was adjourned on those charges last year, prosecutors announced Tuesday.
After a two-month trial, in which he was accused of raping four women in hotels between 2004 and 2013, Weinstein was found guilty in December of sexually assaulting an Italian model and actress following a a film festival in Beverly Hills.
Jurors acquitted Weinstein of assaulting a massage therapist and deadlocked on assaulting Lauren Young – a former actress who also testified against him in New York – and Siebel Newsom, who was a rising actress when she alleged that he attacked her in a hotel room in the mid-2000s.
The Times does not normally identify sexual assault victims, but Siebel Newsom, wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Young have previously testified against Weinstein in public court or identified themselves in media accounts.
Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in a California prison last month. Combined with the 23-year sentence he received after being convicted of rape in New York in 2020, the disgraced Hollywood mogul, aged 70 and in poor health, is virtually guaranteed to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Young appeared in court on Tuesday and asked prosecutors to try his case again. Siebel Newsom, however, submitted a written statement asking the prosecutor’s office not to pursue a second trial on his allegation.
“The primary intent of the first partner in coming forward was to ensure that Weinstein would spend the rest of his life in prison. Although the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charges related to his experiment, we believe that his testimony, in chorus with the testimonies of the other brave victims, led to Weinstein’s conviction and the 16-year sentence he faces in California after serving his New York sentence,” his attorney said. , Elizabeth Fegan, in a statement.
“Had the court not imposed a proper sentence,” Fegan said, “my client would have been willing to support prosecutors if they had chosen to try Weinstein again, even given the enormous emotional toll it would take on her. .”
Assistant Dist. Atti. Paul Thompson, the lead prosecutor handling the case, said Weinstein would only have faced an additional year in prison if convicted on the count related to Young’s allegation.
Weinstein will now be returned to New York police custody, where he is still appealing his conviction, according to his attorney, Mark Werksman.
Juda Engelmayer, a spokesperson for Weinstein, called prosecutors’ decision on Tuesday “an important step toward Harvey Weinstein’s appeal to Los Angeles.”
“Now he and his team can focus solely on the claims of Jane Doe 1, for which there is broad support and evidence that corroborates Harvey’s claims that it never happened,” Engelmayer wrote in a E-mail.