UPDATED: Harvey Weinstein used his leverage as a dominant film producer, and the career dreams he had the power to deliver on for aspiring newcomers to the industry, to trap young women into sexual encounters they never asked for and didn’t want, a Manhattan prosecutor said today in opening statements in the rape and sexual assault retrial of the once-powerful Pulp Fiction producer and Shakespeare in Love Oscar-winner. 

“He used those dream opportunities as weapons,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Shannon Lucey told the seven-woman, five-man jury on Wednesday morning. 

One of Weinstein’s targets was 16-year-old model, Kaja Sokola, newly arrived to New York from her native Poland. In her opening, Lucey identified Sokola — now a mother living in Manhattan — as the previously unnamed new accuser in a revived indictment of Weinstein that charges him with committing a first-degree criminal sexual act. 

Lucey said that the criminal charge is for an assault on Sokola that occurred in 2006 at a Manhattan hotel —  four years after she arrived in New York as a teen-aged Polish beauty pageant winner and new U.S. model agency signee. But the prosecutor also recounted an earlier, uncharged episode between Weinstein and Sokola in 2002 at an apartment in Manhattan that occurred days after she had stepped off a plane in New York for the first time in her life.

After opening prosecution statements lasting more than an hour, Judge Curtis Farber called a brief recess before Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, was elected to deliver his own opening statement. 

PREVIOUS, 6:04 AM: Over five years after Harvey Weinstein’s previous New York City sex crimes trial saw the once powerful producer sentenced to 23 years behind bars, the much accused Weinstein’s retrial for rape and sexual assault gets underway this morning in a Manhattan courtroom.

Less than 24 hours after the jury was seated Tuesday, opening statements will be delivered today starting at 7 am PT/10 am ET to a panel of seven women and five men.

Like the Big Apple jury before it five years ago and a Los Angeles jury in 2022, the jury Wednesday will begin the process of hearing the arguments and evidence to decide the guilt or innocence of the Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love. If found guilty again, the ailing 72-year-old Weinstein, who saw his previous conviction tossed out in April 2024 over controversial prior bad acts testimony, will likely spend the rest of his life in a state prison.

After seeing their successful work in 2020 cast aside, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office are again painting Weinstein as a serial predator. As they have before, the prosecution will tell this jury that Weinstein for decades used his dominant position in Hollywood to attack and abuse women in the industry and then buy their silence with intimidation, money and NDAs.

Weinstein is facing three accusers in court this time.

Two are women he was previously convicted of subjecting to sexual violence, Jessica Mann and Miriam Haley, before those guilty verdicts — for rape and commission of a criminal sexual act, respectively — were overturned. An accusation from a third, unnamed woman is the basis of a new grand jury indictment that was handed down in September, for a single count of first-degree criminal sexual act. The third woman is expected to testify that Weinstein forced himself on her in a Manhattan hotel room in 2006. 

Amidst accusations, allegations and dozens of lawsuits over the past eight years since his very public downfall, Weinstein has maintained that all of his sexual encounters were consensual. Those assertions by Weinstein include those with multiple accusers who had never met each other giving very similar graphic accounts, going back to the 1970s, of rapes and assaults in hotel rooms, in homes and during industry events. 

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Whispered about, those stories surfaced in 2017 in a pair of Pulitzer Prize-winning exposés by the New York Times and New Yorker magazine. Opening a floodgate of misconduct, casting couch and elsewhere, the pieces on Weinstein gave rise to a movement with #MeToo as its hashtag and Weinstein as Exhibit A. More than anyone, Weinstein came to embody the figure of the powerful, seemingly untouchable male predator finally being called out by his victims in an overdue reckoning for all abusers of women.

Now Weinstein’s legal team, led by defense lawyer Arthur Aidala, have cast the overturning of the conviction as a step toward vindication. “We are hopeful that this time, the legal process will rise above noise and narrative, and allow Harvey Weinstein the fair trial he’s long been denied,” Weinstein representative Juda Engelmayer told Deadline on April 22. “He deserves the chance to clear his name and preserve a legacy that has been overshadowed by deeply flawed and misleading accusations.”

At the same time as this East Coast trial is beginning, Weinstein is appealing his 2022 conviction by an L.A. jury for raping and assaulting a woman, identified only as Jane Doe, in 2013.

The West Coast conviction has kept the Pulp Fiction producer incarcerated even after his prison sentence and conviction in New York was vacated. That court ruled  4-3 that the judge in the original trial, James Burke, had unfairly prejudiced the jury against the defendant by allowing three additional women to testify that Weinstein had assaulted them even though their accusations were not contained in the original indictment. 

With now ex-Judge Burke not reappointed by Mayor Eric Adams’ office, the retrial will be overseen by Judge Curtis Farber. At the same time, the prosecution will have a new team leader, Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Nicole Blumberg, chief of the office’s Intimate Partners and Sexual Violence Bureau.

In and out of hospitals the past five years, Weinstein returns to court in New York a gaunter and paler version of his old larger-than-life and loud self, having recently undergone treatment for cancer and emergency heart and lung surgery. It is unclear whether he will testify in his own defense, which he did not do in either of his previous criminal trials in New York and Los Angeles. Playing to the drama, lawyer Aidala has said he wouldn’t rule it out. 

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On the other hand, Mann, who was an aspiring actress, and Haley, who worked as a television production assistant, are both expected to return to the stand in the retrial. That could mean a repeat of the graphic and emotionally grueling testimony that preceded Weinstein’s first conviction.

Judge Faber has said that he hopes the trial will be over “by the end of May.”