Inside the jury room at the second sex crime trial of Harvey Weinstein, things were getting tense.
The 12 jurors had already acquitted the former Hollywood mogul on one felony sex crime charge, and they had began to deliberate on a second when the discussions suddenly turned pointed, and personal.
One juror, who had been calm and had even prayed with the others, abruptly began accusing another of having been “bought out” by Mr. Weinstein or his lawyers.
The moment, which occurred on the second day of deliberations in a case that was brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office after its earlier sex crime conviction against Mr. Weinstein was overturned, foreshadowed the rancor and dysfunction that would ultimately consume the panel, leading it to deadlock on Thursday over the question of whether Mr. Weinstein raped an aspiring actress in a hotel room in 2013.
This account of what occurred in the jury room is based on interviews with several jurors, particularly one panelist who came forward twice to voice concerns to the judge about the behavior of his fellow jurors.
That panelist, juror No. 7, described the interactions as having grown increasingly contentious and marked by personal attacks.
At one point on the second day of deliberations, last Friday morning, juror No. 7 emerged from the jury room to voice his concerns about how jurors were interacting with one another.
By that afternoon, he said, the discussions had devolved.
“This person was yelling at this other juror, saying, ‘Oh, we know what it is — they just want a hung jury,’” recalled juror No. 7, who spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being targeted for his role in the discussions. “‘They might have been bought out by the defense, we don’t know.’”
The same afternoon, after returning to the jury box and having apparently reached his limit, he asked to be dismissed. The judge in the case, Justice Curtis Farber of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, denied his request and sent him back to the deliberations.
As the accusations continued to fly, the foreman, a man who had emigrated from the Dominican Republic and spoke English only haltingly, became concerned. So when the jurors gathered again on Monday, he sent a note asking to speak to the judge, juror No. 7 recalled.
Juror No. 7, who is in his late 20s, was relieved, telling the foreman that he couldn’t bring himself to go back out and speak to the judge again.
“Nobody took me seriously when I went out there,” he said he told the foreman.
The foreman told Justice Farber that other jurors were trying to make him change his mind on his vote and that he didn’t like that, according to a transcript of his remarks. He was also concerned, he told the court, that people were talking about Mr. Weinstein’s past.
Afterward, the other jurors suspected that he had conveyed “something negative” to the judge, noting that they had briefly had to stop deliberations, juror No. 7 said. Later that day, Justice Farber gave the jury instructions on working together collaboratively and returned them to their deliberations.
For a while, the jurors fell into a more cooperative spirit, juror No. 7 said. They worked their way through evidence and discussed the various allegations, he said.
By the end of the day on Monday, juror No. 7 said, he sent another note to the judge asking for coffee, “because we were sitting here for so long.”
The jurors were all giggling when Justice Farber read it aloud, he said.
By Wednesday, though, things took a turn.
“I just don’t know what happened,” juror No. 7 said.
He said the foreman had come in that morning and wanted to talk to the group about something on his mind.
“I want everybody to respect each other’s decisions,” the foreman said, according to juror No. 7, who believed that jurors should not pressure one another to change their votes.
But things started to break down, juror No. 7 said, when the foreman admonished them for being rude to one another.
Firing back at the foreman, another juror, identified by No. 7 as an older woman, said, “You don’t know me,” and, at another point, “I’ll catch you outside.”
That’s essentially where the discussions stopped, juror No. 7 said.
It’s not unusual for jurors to have disputes during deliberations, said Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, a jury consultant who worked for Mr. Weinstein’s retrial team, as well as on other high-profile trials.
“Emotions run very, very high,” she said, a phenomenon that she said she had seen even in mock jury deliberations.
Ms. Dimitrius recalled that when a jury was sequestered in a hotel during a trial decades ago, one of the jurors had run through the hallway saying she had an Uzi submachine gun that she would use on other jurors. However, unlike that jury, the one in Mr. Weinstein’s trial was not sequestered, she said.
“The intensity of what must have happened back there, I think, was truly unique,” she said.
By Thursday morning, the deliberations had broken down to their lowest point yet. And unlike in the climactic scene in the 1957 legal drama “12 Angry Men” — a film juror No. 7 said he had never seen — none of the holdouts had broken down and changed their votes to align with those of the other jurors.
The foreman refused even to enter the same room as the other jurors, saying he felt threatened. They had deadlocked over the question of whether Mr. Weinstein had raped the aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, in a hotel room — a count he had been convicted on during his first Manhattan trial in 2020.
Justice Farber declared a mistrial.
Afterward, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur L. Aidala, issued a statement dismissing any implication that his team or his client had paid off a juror, calling it “patently false” and saying they had insisted on a thorough and immediate investigation of the jurors’ interactions by the court.
Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, pledged to retry Mr. Weinstein for a third time, saying Ms. Mann deserved justice. He added that what had occurred among the jurors appeared to be not out of the ordinary.
“Vigorous and robust exchange of ideas within the jury room is a hallmark, an important hallmark, of our system,” he said. “This is consistent with the administration of justice.”
The jurors filed out of the courthouse, with some later saying that the foreman’s complaints about his fellow panelists were “overblown.”
“Everything he did was sneaky, and we all feel bad because we really wanted to do this,” said Chantan Holmes, who served as juror No. 9. “We put our hearts and souls in this. We’ve been here for seven weeks.”
Reached by phone, another juror said simply that she was not “happy about the way things happened.”
The foreman, too, seemed deflated after the trial ended.
“I didn’t expect any of that,” he told a reporter in Spanish on Thursday afternoon, standing shirtless in the doorway of his apartment. “That was a new experience for me.”
Asked if he had truly felt threatened by other jurors in the room, he let out a heavy sigh.
“There were a lot of comments made,” he said.
Maria Cramer and Anusha Bayya contributed reporting.
Hurubie Meko is a Times reporter covering criminal justice in New York, with a focus on the Manhattan district attorney’s office and state courts.
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