The Jury For Harvey Weinstein’s Trial Has Been Chosen, And His Team Is Demanding A Mistrial

January 17, 2020 / Posted by:

USA Today reports that the jury for Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial has finally been chosen. We know Gigi Hadid is not one of them. We also know that Harvey’s lawyers responded to the jury selection by demanding a mistrial.

BuzzFeed reports that the breakdown of the 12 person jury is: six white men, one black man (for a total of seven men), two black women, two white women, and one Afro-Latina woman (for a total of five women). Additionally, a white man, a black woman, and Latina woman were chosen as alternates. The occupations of the jurors include banking and security, among other fields.

TMZ says that Harvey’s lead lawyer Donna Rotunno has accused one female juror of lying during the screening process. One juror allegedly failed to disclose that she wrote a book called Age of Consent, a novel about boarding school girls engaging in sexual relationships with older men in NYC. Rotunno believes that some of the themes in the book are too similar to some of the allegations made against Harvey Weinstein, and she believes said juror can’t be truly impartial. So they’re demanding a mistrial.

Here’s where it gets a little murky. The novel isn’t scheduled to be released until July 2020. So it’s not known if Harvey’s team has even read the book. But when you’re grasping at straws…

And Harvey’s team has been grasping at anything they can get their hands near. The last attempt at a delay was a request to have the trial moved to another county, because according to Harvey’s team, he can’t get a fair trial in Manhattan, due to everyone knowing who he is. Oh wow, you think that’s the kind of thing that would work against him? Shocking. But that request was denied. The reason being that people in another county would have the exact same access to information that people in Manhattan would have. So now they’re complaining about jurors. They also complained that the jury selection took place while Judge James Burke was deliberating on their request to have the trial moved.

No one should be surprised that Harvey’s team is also complaining that jurors were not screened in private. Harvey’s lawyers filed a motion with Judge Burke, saying that there was a ton of publicity surrounding the jury selection process, and that all the jurors picked have probably been reading stuff. Judge Burke side-eyed that motion as well, allegedly saying:

“Your application is denied. Nothing you said makes logical sense to me.”

Assistant District Attorney Harriet Galvin also gave a little statement regarding Harvey’s team’s attempt at delaying or dismissing, and she believes it’s all bullshit just to keep the trial from moving ahead.

“(The) defendant’s motion, lacking in any solid factual or legal basis, should be viewed as a transparent attempt to delay the proceedings and disrupt the presentation of the People’s case which is set to begin on Jan. 22, with witnesses flying in from around the world.”

But for now, the trial is going to happen, regardless of that juror’s book. It’s not known if Judge Burke will consider that missing bibliography to be a deliberate lie, or if it just wasn’t clear when she filled out her jury papers. But what happens if the judge dismisses all that too, and Donna has to try to find a new angle? What then? Maybe if she’s digging into the juror’s personal lives and finding things that might cause trouble, she can scan through their Twitter accounts. “Your honor, as you can see, Juror #7 once tweeted that ‘Shakespeare in Love’ sucks, adding that it should have never won Best Picture at the 1997 Oscar. Obviously this jury hasn’t been vetted properly and is biased against poor Mr. Weinstein. MISTRIAL PLEASE?

Pic: Wenn.com

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