In the center will be a man. Around, many women: victims, accusers, and lawyers. The criminal trial for sexual assault on former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, due to open on January 6 in New York, is out of the ordinary in more ways than one. Only two cases will be at the heart of the debates: the complaint of one of his former mistresses, accusing him of having raped her in 2013, and that of a production assistant claiming to have been attacked in 2006. Enough to risk to the accused life imprisonment.
But other shadows will hang over the court, those of several dozen women, 87 according to a count of USA Today, who in the past two years have accused the sixty-something man of sexual assault. Testimonies that helped spark the #metoo movement.
A societal subtext
This criminal situation with an obviously societal subtext does not seem to displease Donna Rotunno. The 43-year-old star lawyer for Harvey Weinstein is convinced that his client, who has denied all charges, will emerge bleached. Long hair, a face cut with a knife, the young woman took over in July, with her collaborator Damon Cheronis, the succession of the team of lawyers thanked by the producer. A daring bet only a few weeks before the start of the trial then scheduled for September. But self-confidence is clearly not what Donna Rotunno lacks.
"Many of these alleged complaints come from people who exposed embarrassing but not illegal exchanges. »Donna Rotunno
The lawyer assumes a form of critical spirit in the face of the #metoo wave and this army of women who have denounced inappropriate gestures and traumatic assaults on the part of his client. "Many of these alleged complaints come from people who denounced embarrassing but not illegal exchanges", she explained in July in a column published by Newsweek.
Armed with this logic, the Chicago lawyer intends to pass her client off as a morally questionable being, but by no means a criminal. Harvey Weinstein committed "Sins" But "He is not a rapist", she repeated on CBS News in September. Without fear of the mixture of the kinds, the jurist, raised in the catholic religion, saw fit to specify: “There is a difference between a sin and a crime. "
Determined to cast doubt on the lack of consent of women harassed by Harvey Weinstein, she sticks to a creed, yet regularly denied by psychologists: in her eyes, a woman "Always the choice". "When talking about sex between a man and a woman, you have to take into account that there is always a gray area where the lines get blurred. " A blurred territory in which would have sailed "60% of men" that she successfully defended.
