Judge Lench also ruled that prosecutors could call only five female witnesses to testify about uncharged “prior bad acts” by Mr. Weinstein; prosecutors had asked to call another 11, including the actress Daryl Hannah and the activist and former actress Rose McGowan. Later, Judge Lench further limited these contextual witnesses to four, citing accounts that were too similar.
Those four women will testify under a law known in California as 1108, which allows prosecutors to introduce evidence of a defendant’s uncharged misconduct, in an effort to show that Mr. Weinstein had a standard mode of operating in such situations. Only one of the women has been publicly identified. She is Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, an Italian model who told New York police in 2015 that Mr. Weinstein had groped her breasts and tried to force his hand up her skirt during a work meeting at his office.
“We fear that the government is basically trying to blow Mr. Weinstein away with a fire hose of allegations which are false and uncredible,” Mr. Werksman said. “The challenge for the defense is to get the jury to look at each and every allegation against him and weigh the evidence of each and every accuser.”
Manhattan prosecutors used the law’s New York equivalent in Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 trial, calling on three additional witnesses to help the jury understand the movie producer’s pattern of behavior with his victims.
In other pretrial matters in Los Angeles, Judge Lench has sided with prosecutors. In August, for instance, she rejected a defense request to delay the trial until after “She Said” debuts in theaters. Mr. Werksman had argued that ads for the film could “dramatically prejudice” the jury. Universal Pictures is expected to spend an at least $25 million to promote the film’s domestic release.
“We’ll just have to deal with it,” Judge Lench said from the bench.
One important trial-related question is what jurors will be told, if anything, about Mr. Weinstein’s New York conviction. Los Angeles prosecutors had won the right to include information about part of it. But when the New York Court of Appeals accepted Mr. Weinstein’s case in late August, the matter became complicated: If the Los Angeles jury finds Mr. Weinstein guilty and bases its decision in part on the information about the New York verdict — and that verdict is subsequently reversed — it could become fodder for an appeal in California.
“We have not decided whether we will present evidence of it,” Greg Risling, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County district attorney, said in an email.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nytimes.com
