When Harvey Weinstein traveled around the world as a Hollywood titan, his movie production and distribution company would often host parties. His assistants knew exactly whom to invite.
There was a list of women called “friends of Harvey,” according to one of his former executive assistants. The list was broken down by city, country and region, and Mr. Weinstein’s aides depended on it, said the former assistant, Elizabeth Perz.
“Friends of Harvey are women that he would meet at events or parties or festivals,” Ms. Perz said last week during Mr. Weinstein’s retrial in New York on sex crimes charges. “Or somewhere.”
And if a woman fell out of favor, she said, her name would be crossed out.
One woman in the “L.A. Friends” group, according to a version of the list presented by prosecutors, was Jessica Mann, an aspiring actress who says Mr. Weinstein raped her in 2013.
Ms. Mann is one of the main witnesses in Mr. Weinstein’s retrial in Manhattan criminal court. After a state appeals court overturned a previous conviction last year, the former producer now faces two counts of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and one count of third-degree rape.
Ms. Mann testified in the first trial, in 2020, along with another accuser, Miriam Haley, a former television production assistant who said Mr. Weinstein assaulted her in 2006. In his retrial, Mr. Weinstein faces a new charge of sexually assaulting Kaja Sokola, a model, in a Manhattan hotel in 2006.
Mr. Weinstein has also been convicted of sex crimes in California and has been sentenced to prison.
As the month-old trial resumes Monday, here is what has happened so far and what to expect.
A journal and testimony from a new witness
Over roughly five days of testimony this month, Ms. Sokola laid out her history of interactions with Mr. Weinstein, beginning in 2002 when she met him as a new model in New York City at the age of 16. Mr. Weinstein assaulted her multiple times in the years that followed, she said.
One of Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, Michael Cibella, tried to chip away at Ms. Sokola’s testimony during cross-examination.
He questioned Ms. Sokola about her relationship with her estranged husband and suggested that she sued Mr. Weinstein and his companies in 2019 because she needed money to leave him. She then used the settlement she received to finance her return to New York City in 2022, he said. Ms. Sokola firmly rebutted those assertions.
Key evidence for the defense included journal entries that Ms. Sokola wrote in 2015. When presented with the journal in court, she became upset that the defense had revealed what she said were her private Alcoholics Anonymous notes.
However, the judge, Curtis Farber, ruled that the defense could refer to narrow excerpts from the journal, which Ms. Sokola had written in Polish.
The defense noted that Ms. Sokola had written that two men had sexually assaulted her. When questioned, she said that neither man was Mr. Weinstein. His name did appear in the journal, she acknowledged, but next to it she had written only that he had broken promises to her.
Mr. Cibella suggested that Ms. Sokola was perpetrating a lie by accusing his client of sexual assault.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she responded.
The judge overseeing the trial
Justice Farber has often had to defuse arguments between lawyers. By Wednesday, he had paid a price.
“Good morning. As you can see, I’ve lost my voice,” he told jurors.
Prosecutors and defense lawyers have had to navigate a slew of rulings from the judge on what they can ask witnesses and say to the jury. As they have tested those limits, each side has faced objections from the other, frequently derailing the proceedings.
Justice Farber has presided over heated cross-talk, as lawyers raised their voices over one another to be heard. He has often been forced to huddle in a corner of the courtroom with both parties for hushed arguments out of the jury’s hearing. And he has had to admonish both sides when they strayed from his rulings or asked questions he deemed inappropriate.
During one especially heated moment, the judge scrambled to find his gavel.
“I had to go looking for it,” he said later. “I hadn’t used it in 13 years.”
What to expect in the sixth week
Ms. Mann is expected to testify this week, laying out for a second time her accusations against Mr. Weinstein. Five years ago, she told jurors that Mr. Weinstein injected his penis with erection medication and raped her in a hotel room in Midtown Manhattan in 2013. She acknowledged that she had continued to see him and had consensual sex with him after the alleged assault.
Prosecutors are likely to call experts this week who will testify about why victims of rape and sexual assault sometimes maintain contact with their assailants.
The prosecution’s case will wind down after Ms. Mann’s testimony. The defense will then lay out its case to the jurors.
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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