Ahead of his third Manhattan trial, Harvey Weinstein has joined the likes of Luigi Mangione and Sean “Diddy” Combs on defense attorney Marc Agnifilo’s star-studded client roster, according to court docs filed by the disgraced film producer’s team on Wednesday.
Weinstein is swapping out his longtime lawyer, Arthur Aidala, with Agnifilo and two partners at his firm, Jacob Kaplan and Teny Geragos, who last summer convinced a federal jury to acquit Combs of the top counts he faced in his sex trafficking case and have secured several pretrial victories representing Mangione in his state and federal prosecutions over the slaying of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Aidala has spent years representing the disgraced Miramax founder, since an avalanche of sexual assault allegations spurred his steep fall from grace and turbocharged the #MeToo movement almost a decade ago.
The Brooklyn-born lawyer’s behind-the-scenes lobbying led Mayor Eric Adams’ office to remove Manhattan Supreme Court Justice James Burke from the bench, a veteran judge with whom he frequently sparred at Weinstein’s 2020 trial.
Reached by the Daily News Wednesday, Aidala said he would stay the course on Weinstein’s appeal of his recent sexual assault conviction.
“I was not prepared to waste three months of my life on an E felony trial — the lowest level crime — where the client has done all of the potential jail time,” Aidala said.
“Harvey’s appeal is the most important part of his legal cases and we will be working diligently to overturn his only conviction as we did in the past.”
Agnifilo, Kaplan and Geragos are joining Weinstein’s team as pinch hitters ahead of his next appearance in Manhattan Supreme Court on March 4, with a trial date still to be set for the outstanding third-degree rape charge concerning an alleged assault on aspiring actor Jessica Mann in 2013. Law360 first reported on the new draft.
The fallen Hollywood titan was convicted of raping Mann at his landmark #MeToo trial in Manhattan in 2020, in addition to forcibly performing oral sex on TV production assistant Miriam Haley. Those guilty verdicts and the resultant 23-year sentence were tossed by New York’s Court of Appeals in 2024 based on allegations the jury heard about from three additional women, which were not tied to the charges.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was not yet in office when the case first went on trial, retried it last summer, adding Polish model and aspiring actress Kaja Sokola as an additional witness. The jury convicted Weinstein, 73, again on Haley’s allegations, found him not guilty of the same crimes in relation to Sokola’s claims, and could not reach a unanimous conclusion on Mann during fraught deliberations.
Weinstein was also convicted of three counts of rape in California in 2022 and subsequently sentenced to 16 years, an outcome he is also appealing. He faces up to an additional 25 years when sentenced for the recent New York conviction and could be sentenced to an additional four if convicted at the upcoming trial.
Weinstein’s new team has been on trial in Manhattan federal court for more than a month, representing disgraced luxury real estate broker Oren Alexander against sex trafficking allegations he faces alongside two of his brothers, with the defense case slated to begin next week. Kaplan was involved in Weinstein’s defense after he was first indicted in 2018.
Depending on how the timing works out, the decision to take on Weinstein could see them spend the rest of 2026 before a jury, with Mangione’s state trial slated to begin in June and his federal case scheduled for September.
