Weinstein Process: Believed is the one who shouts the loudest “Wolf!”

In the Harvey Weinstein case, the legal principle that both sides should be heard does not seem to apply to the press. Neither the plaintiffs’ questionable appearances nor the arguments of Weinstein’s defenders are addressed in the reports.

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“David Letterman Show”, August 6, 1997. Actress Annabella Sciorra is a guest. The talk host asks the young woman if she would like to lie. Yes, she replies with a smile. She had always lied a lot about her life, some stories that she had invented to confuse the press were very complex and unusual. Where did he come from, David Letterman, because he wanted to know that she wasn’t sitting and lying right here? Sciorra asks confidently and charmingly.

“No further questions.” A gentle whisper goes through the audience in the courtroom. Donna Rotunno, Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer, ends the three-hour cross-examination. It is the third week in a trial that not only tests the accused but also #MeToo.

Breaks and incoherences

59-year-old Sciorra is the first witness to the indictment. Although the act would be statute-barred, Weinstein is said to have raped Sciorra in 1991 in her New York apartment. The film producer is officially charged by two other women. In 2006, he is said to have forced former production assistant Mimi Haleyi to have oral sex in her apartment in Soho. In 2013, he also raped stylist Jessica Mann. Weinstein pleads not guilty. Every sexual contact with every woman was always consensual.

Sciorra, an eighties starlet who didn’t quite make it into the contemporary film world, was still involved in Weinstein productions decades after the incident, although, as she claims in court, she “feared for her life” whenever Weinstein did was near them. At the end of 2016 – Sciorra was now broke, there were no commitments – she asked Weinstein for work through her agent. This declined for the first time in over twenty years. In October 2017, Sciorra contacted the press about the rape allegation.

In court, her story shows ruptures, inconsistencies, and gaps in memory. None of this was to be read in the national and international press in the following days, just as rarely is the clip in which Sciorra admits that he likes to lie. The short video should focus on Sciorra’s personality structure, which could be used to identify motives for making false statements. However, for strategic reasons, the charges are dismissed as “comedy” in the media without any concern.

«‹ He raped me ›», «Victory for #MeToo» – that’s the headline of the last few days; they are the prelude to predictable reporting that causes yawning and worry at the same time. The truth, or the greatest possible approximation to it, is less than ever in neutral representations or the narrative involving all aspects, but in the tendencyful, dramatically one-sided. Who is believed? The one who shouts the loudest “Wolf!”

The opinion is clear

70 journalists sit in the courtroom every day, most of them from the American media, only a few from abroad. They are always the same faces, mostly young and female. After the first few weeks, everyone knows each other on the 15th floor of the Manhattan Supreme Court. Every morning the same television journalist Weinstein asks shortly before he walks into the courtroom with the rollator: “How are you today, Harvey?” Answer: “Good.” Lawyers, law students, a few onlookers, friends and acquaintances of the respective witnesses.

The interrogation days begin with the cross-examination of the indictment, which understandably tries to portray Weinstein badly. However, after the prosecution’s interrogation ended, some journalists got up and never came back. Why report from the defense side too? Why raise doubts about the narrative of women?

The opinion is clear, Weinstein is guilty – part of the story is quickly summed up in a few sentences, and the rest of the world copies without checking. Newspapers that do not send journalists to the Manhattan Supreme Court also serve their readers as chewed and trendy items without the will to be neutral. In the hall itself, journalists hardly ever look up from their laptops to study the facial expressions of those involved, to capture dynamics, to give space to intuition. When Sciorra theatrically raises his arms over his head to demonstrate how Weinstein held them, the clinking of the keyboards swells like an approaching swarm of locusts.

But there are also defense issues. Why Sciorra opened the door poorly dressed as a single woman on the night in question, without knowing who was standing there. Why she admitted a few minutes ago that Weinstein was standing with her in his bedroom, gently waving, then shouted everything back. Why she never held the gatekeeper accountable, who sent her rapist upstairs, why she continued to work for the Weinstein Company, spent the night in the hotel room next to Weinstein at the Cannes Film Festival – the list is long, and Sciorra vacillates between “I’ve forgotten everything “And she was” too terrified to act “, even in the decades after.

It is true that women do not always report sexual violence to the police immediately, out of fear or shame. But even if you do not like to hear it: there is the wrong memory of events that never happened. #MeToo has also often proven that livelihoods are destroyed for vengeance or injured vanity without a justifiable act – the case of actor Kevin Spacey is a good example of this.

Meetings, mails and requests

Even before the cross-examinations expected in the coming weeks, the stories of Mimi Haleyi and Jessica Mann also showed inconsistencies that had already been set out in court but were spared in the press – unless they shrugged as speculative. The most pressing question: why did the women still search for the events of Weinstein’s proximity for many years, and not fearfully, but with clearly articulated affection?

Like Haleyi, cross-examined on Monday, whom Weinstein met at a party in LA in July 2006 and who began working on the set of Weinstein’s “Project Runway” shortly afterwards. On July 26, 2006, forced oral sex occurred at the Tribeca Hotel in New York, as Haleyi told the press in October 2017. In the days after the attack, Haleyi asked Weinstein to let her fly to LA. Weinstein does this, pays the plane ticket. In September 2006, Haleyi requested a meeting with Weinstein in London and also had him book the flight ticket so that they could travel together.

Time passed. In May 2007, Haleyi asked Weinstein for professional help and later thanked him in a long and loving email for how much he always supported her. In June 2008, Haleyi proposed another meeting, wrote in an email whether he remembered the beautiful evening back then at the Tribeca Hotel (where the alleged abuse took place).

Years later she wrote to him regularly. No trace of fear or anger in the emails, the tone is calm. 3000 days later everything was different, Haleyi accuses Weinstein. She has to hand over her schedule, which she kept to the minute, to the police. Only all meetings with Weinstein over the years have been erased or wildly scribbled, only the oral sex day is still there.

Women are not just victims

Women can lie, calculate, ice-cold revenge, just like men. Is this idea so unbearable? In any case, media coverage is content with images of female weakness. Headlines and process reports, written a thousand times by authors who have not spent a minute in the courtroom, then distributed millions of times on social media, show the weak gender in the total staging: crying and confused.

It is also a fact that Hollywood always had the ranks of those who “entered” sexual favors – because sex replaces everything is more powerful than power, Homer, Shakespeare and Philip Roth knew. Women (and men) often slept up, using not only intellectual but also erotic capital for professional or private goals. The so-called “casting couch” has been around since the theater was founded. Young writers, actors, directors, some unemployed and in uncertain material conditions, meet powerful producers. Going to sleep in Hollywood was a deal where both sides were active, both won or neither; it was a medal with two grubby sides.

Weinstein’s lawyer Mimi Haleyi asks why she heartily decorated the day of Weinstein’s attack and the days after on her calendar. Did that reflect her emotional state? Maybe it did, says Haleyi.