Free Harvey Weinstein

Justice is for — not just people we agree with.

Harvey Weinstein was once the most powerful man in Hollywood, back when Hollywood was one of the most powerful cultural institutions on the planet.

Now Weinstein — the producer of movies such as Shakespeare in Love, The English Patient and The King’s Speech — sits in a New York prison, disgraced and friendless. These days he is better known as America’s most famous sexual predator, having faced multiple rape and sexual assault charges over the past nine years.

However, last week, the jury in his latest trial failed to reach a verdict, prompting the judge to declare a mistrial. Contrary to what you might have read in the media, this was the right decision.

Weinstein stood accused of sexually assaulting aspiring actress Jessica Mann, in a New York hotel room. However, given the evidence presented, the mistrial should not have come as a surprise.

What is surprising is that the case ever reached a courtroom at all. Quite simply, there was no evidence against Weinstein except the allegations of his accuser. On the contrary, all the physical evidence in the case proved his innocence, not his guilt.

Weinstein remains imprisoned for other sexual assault convictions, but those cases also rest on similarly shaky foundations.

I was in court every day of his first trial in New York and reviewed transcripts from subsequent cases, and it is clear that Weinstein has become a victim of the #MeToo moral panic and the “Believe All Women” madness that swept and is still sweeping through society.

You can learn the truth about the first New York trial in our verbatim podcast The Harvey Weinstein Trial: Unfiltered.

To be clear, Weinstein is a cheating pig - who tried to sleep with almost every actress who asked him for a job - even when he had a wife and child at home. He also has appallingly stupid leftist beliefs.

Yet justice is not reserved for those with pleasant personalities, agreeable politics or upstanding morals. It must apply universally or it is not true justice. And justice demands Harvey Weinstein’s release.

This was actually the third time Weinstein faced trial for the alleged 2013 sexual assault of Mann.

He has been charged and convicted and then cleared on appeal of many but not all offences. At this point, one must ask: Can Weinstein really receive a fair trial? His name has been indelibly linked to #MeToo villainy, prejudicing juries before evidence is even heard.

In the most recent Jessica Mann retrial, the evidence made a conviction untenable. What prosecutors labeled a sexually abusive relationship was, the defense convincingly claimed, a consensual four-year relationship until the publication of #MeToo allegations against Weinstein in 2017 prompted Mann to reframe how she characterised it.

The latest trial revealed Mann as either deliberately lying to conceal a romance she once cherished or deluding herself by retroactively rewriting history — or both.

Weinstein and Mann met at a Hollywood Hills party in 2013.

Mann, a young woman from Washington State trying to break into acting, walked up to him, flirtatiously pinched Weinstein on the cheek, and told him he looked cute in his tuxedo. They paired off immediately. Within minutes he asked for her phone number and she gave it to him. They began dating. In what could have been a scene from one of Weinstein’s rom com movies - their first date was in a bookstore.

Mann claims that in the middle of their relationship, Weinstein had raped her twice. The prosecution’s case rested entirely on Jessica Mann’s uncorroborated testimony yet every independent source that emerged at trial directly contradicted her.

Her roommate and closest confidante, Talita Maia, so close that Mann called her the “Velcro friend,” provided devastating rebuttals to so many of Mann’s allegations drawn from what she had witnessed and what Mann herself had told her at the time.

Mann claimed she was assaulted by Weinstein in a Los Angeles hotel in 2014. She claimed Weinstein “grabbed my arms around the elbow and … pulled me into the bedroom” while Talita sat on the couch nearby.

Talita said this was not true. She testified that Weinstein asked her and Mann to go upstairs after the bar closed, Weinstein and Mann went into the bedroom, closed the door for about ten minutes with “no argument,” “no yelling,” and Mann emerged “normal … okay … like nothing out of the ordinary.”

Talita and Mann both confirmed the relationship continued uninterrupted afterwards.

The alleged assault that Weinstein was charged with in his recent New York retrial, allegedly occurred on March 18, 2013 in a room at the DoubleTree Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. According to Mann’s testimony, Weinstein lured her to his room under the pretense of a breakfast meeting, blocked her from leaving, ignored her repeated refusals, and forcibly raped her.

At the hotel she was sharing a room with a friend, Tommy Lozano, but a front-desk employee at the DoubleTree directly refuted Mann’s claim that Weinstein had the desk call her in Lozano’s room. This was a logistical impossibility, since she was not a registered guest and Weinstein did not even know Lozano’s last name. He could not have made the call in question.

Lozano, who gave evidence in the trial, said he saw Mann that morning immediately after the alleged rape, and noticed nothing unusual.

Additionally, after being allegedly raped by Weinstein, Mann changed her plane tickets so she could stay longer with him and help celebrate his birthday. Then she attended the premiere of August: Osage County - (as a guest of Weinstein). For months afterward in emails to Weinstein she raved about the film as “genius,” “brilliant,” and emotionally moving. From Berlin she texted him: “My mind and heart are open to so many different possibilities.” Weinstein responded with messages of pride: “I’m proud of you.”

The jury decided these were not the words or actions of a woman who had been raped twice and subjected to repeated unwanted sexual contact.

Mann’s own contemporaneous writings, introduced as trial exhibits, provided the most powerful evidence against her. For four years she repeatedly reached out to Weinstein for help and praised him in glowing terms. When she broke up with a boyfriend she texted him simply: “Broke up a relationship. Are you free?” She described him in messages as “the only person … who encouraged her acting” and the one she needed “more than anything else.”

The case just got more ludicrous as the trial unfolded.

Two days after Mann claims Weinstein raped her she wrote a private note to herself (see court exhibit below). In it - it’s clear she wrestled with genuine romantic feelings: “Do I love him or the idea of him?” “Do I love myself enough to make mistakes?” “Do I want to live in accordance with fear or boldness?” and “If he is not there in the future, what will I have?” By any standards this is a strange way to talk about one’s rapist.

On the witness stand she tried to dismiss her affectionate emails and texts as mere “email land” — fake communications designed to manipulate him. Yet her private notes matched the emails word for word.

Another email saw Mann thank Weinstein — her alleged rapist — for his support and kindness.

Mann wrote: “I want to make sure that I make choices that make me feel like I have integrity … You have watched me grow in this … thank you for your unfailing support and kindness. It has helped me believe in myself.”

She was also asking Weinstein to help her with her relationship issues while she dated other men.

Medical and psychological records introduced at trial offered evidence that Weinstein was in fact one of the few stabilizing influences in Mann’s otherwise turbulent life. She had a long-documented history of anxiety and panic disorder. She required psychiatric care before meeting Weinstein (up through 2012) and her mental health collapsed again immediately after the 2017 arrest. The only stable period in her adult life — completely off medication, seeing no doctors, requiring no psychiatrist — was precisely the years 2013 through early 2017 while she was involved with Weinstein.

The defense called Weinstein her “medicine man”: his emotional encouragement and practical support had literally stabilized her mental health during the exact period she now claims was filled with sexual violence.

Over the entire four-year relationship, the evidence showed, Mann continued to seek Weinstein out for practical help: jobs at the very hotels where she claimed assaults occurred (Peninsula, Montage, and the Frederic Fekkai salon), money when she needed it, legal assistance with a car ticket court date she had missed, and emotional support after her father’s death. She even told a psychic she had full “agency” in the relationship and was “getting a lot out of this.”

From 2013–2017 Jessica Mann changed her phone number five times. On every occasion she emailed Weinstein, her alleged rapist, so that he would know her new number.

She even asked him to meet her mother.

There was never any avoidance, immediate outcry, or attempt to end contact — only the sudden reframing of their relationship after the 2017 scandal made Weinstein’s image toxic.

The jury saw exactly what the trial evidence showed: Jessica Mann’s story was not credible. Whether she was deliberately lying on the stand or genuinely deluding herself under external pressure, the mountain of contradictory emails, texts, notes, witness testimony, medical records, and physical impossibilities made reasonable doubt not just possible — but unavoidable.

The jury was right not to convict Harvey Weinstein. In an era of high-profile accusations, this verdict reaffirmed that evidence, not narrative, must decide guilt. Justice prevailed.

You might not like Harvey Weinstein’s morals or his politics or even his leftist-themed movies but they have since gone on to use the same playbook to try and destroy innocent men such as Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Next they are coming for your son, your brother or your husband, maybe even you.

The other allegations against Weinstein also rest on shaky foundations. It’s time for this societal madness to end and Harvey Weinstein to be released.

Justice demands it.

Our podcast The Harvey Weinstein Trail: Unfiltered features re-enactments of his first New York Trial using actual court transcripts.