Prosecutors set the stage Thursday for Harvey Weinstein accuser Jessica Mann to take the stand in the disgraced movie mogul’s sexual assault retrial in Manhattan.
Mann, now 39, testified at Weinstein’s trial in 2020 that she was trying to break into acting in 2013 when he raped her in a New York hotel on March 18, 2013, and again later that year in a Beverly Hills hotel room.
She’s expected to take the stand again in the retrial, after the state’s highest court threw out Weinstein’s guilty verdict last year.
Jurors on Thursday heard from one of Weinstein’s assistants, Elizabeth Perz, who testified that Weinstein invited Mann and her friend, actress and model Talita Maia, to an Oscar viewing party in February 2013. She also told jurors how Weinstein’s assistants maintained a running “FOH” or “Friends of Harvey” list.
“A Friend of Harvey was a woman that he’d meet at events or parties or festivals or wherever,” Perz testified.
Perz testified about spotting prescription bottles and empty bottles in Weinstein’s bags, and when asked to describe the medications she saw, she responded, “It’s for erectile dysfunction.”
Mann is expected to testify about getting into a toxic and confusing relationship with the twice-her-age movie producer after she moved to Los Angeles from Washington state, and acknowledge that several of their sexual encounters were consensual.
The charges against Weinstein involve an alleged episode at a Midtown hotel in 2013 when Mann said no and Weinstein didn’t listen, raping her.
Jurors also heard from Marci Liroff, a longtime casting director who now works as an intimacy coordinator on film sets, who testified that she agreed to see Mann and Maia at the Weinstein Company’s insistence while she was casting the 2014 film “Vampire Academy.” She was instructed to keep Weinstein out of the casting process, but ultimately acquiesced, she said.
“I didn’t think it was a wise choice … to say no to Mr. Weinstein,” she said. “I have a career to look after.”
She did so reluctantly, she said, because Mann was too tall, too old, and not a strong enough actress to play the teenage vampire “Mia.” The part went to another actress.
Weinstein’s lawyer, Diana Samson, pressed Liroff on whether she resented having to see Mann, and she responded that she simply didn’t have the time to see people she didn’t think were right for the role.
“I did make the time because I was forced into it. Do you understand? I kept getting phone calls from the Weinstein Co. saying Harvey needs you to meet these women,” she said.
The Manhattan Supreme Court retrial has featured days of testimony from two other accusers, former TV production assistant Miriam Haley, and Polish model and aspiring actress Kaja Sokola.
Haley also testified at Weinstein’s 2020 trial, which ended with a jury finding him guilty of raping Mann and of criminal sex act based off Haley’s allegations.
He was sentenced to 23 years in prison, but the state state Court of Appeals overturned that conviction, ruling 4-3 that the trial court judge, James Burke, shouldn’t have allowed testimony of “uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,”
