Report: Manhattan DA to seek indictment of Harvey Weinstein next week

Your feelgood story of the day. In my enthusiasm to see Big Harv locked away, all I can think of are the words a heckler shouted at Anthony Weiner at the immortal Breitbart press conference: “Goodbye, pervert!”

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The DA’s office is denying that the rumors are true but that’s probably more a matter of professional etiquette than a firm denial. It’s bad form for the prosecutor to obviously be leaking to the media about a looming indictment. But it’s no secret that the NYPD has been investigating Weinstein’s alleged rape of actress Paz de la Huerta. The lead detective on the case told Vanity Fair just last week that he thought they already had enough evidence to arrest him. It’s a matter of time.

If you believe NBC New York, that time is next week.

The Manhattan district attorney is expected to present its case seeking an indictment of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein to a grand jury as early as next week, a senior official familiar with the investigation tells News 4 New York…

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance told News 4 Tuesday he could not comment on the ongoing investigation into Weinstein or the report that the case will be presented before a grand jury next week…

He also urged any victim of sexual assault to contact his office, saying, “When that report is made, it will be investigated.”

Vance has good reason to be seen as eager to prosecute Weinstein. After all, he was the DA who *didn’t* prosecute Weinstein after the NYPD caught him on tape in 2015 apparently admitting to an alleged victim that he had touched her breast against her will. “We had the evidence,” said one of Ronan Farrow’s sources to the New Yorker. “It’s a case that made me angrier than I thought possible, and I have been on the force a long time.” A former prosecutor in the DA’s Sex Crimes Unit told Slate, “They’d prosecute 9 people out of 10 with the kinds of goods they had on him.” Coincidentally, Vance received a $10,000 donation to his reelection campaign from sleazy Weinstein lawyer David Boies after the case was dropped. If there’s any prosecutor in America who has a reason to scramble to be the first to indict Weinstein for a sex crime, it’s Vance.

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Actor William H. Macy, who’s worked with Weinstein, was interviewed yesterday and asked whether it’s true that Weinstein was an open secret in Hollywood. Not just the bullying, mind you, but the “the extent of his sexual predation.” Macy:

Of course people knew. A lot of people knew. A lot of people knew. It’s the shame of our industry that it took so long for this to blow up. You know, I’m going to miss Harvey in a way. There are two Harveys: there’s the Harvey who’s abusive to women, and the Harvey who would make films that no other producer would touch, and would champion those films. The same aggressiveness that he brought to chasing women is the same aggressiveness that he brought to pushing these films. When you think of it in the macro, these guys who are so driven, so smart, and they become so powerful, and they’ve got egos that are outsized—you have to have that to be Harvey Weinstein. You have to be the toughest dog on the block. So, we need no ghost from the grave to think that they’re going to be rough on women, and to take advantage of that. It’s a power thing, and it’s just so wrong.

What makes me saddest is that a lot of these women, when they were propositioned by producers—where it’s put this way: if you want the job, you’ll have an affair with me—they didn’t get mad, they were crushed. It destroyed their belief in themselves that this asshole had done this.

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In the UK alone, Weinstein is currently being investigated for 11 separate assaults he allegedly committed against women, some involving rape. Scotland Yard has a task force, “Operation Kaguyak,” dedicated exclusively to gathering evidence of Big Harv’s crimes. Combined with the investigations under way in L.A., that means police activity related to Weinstein now stretches more than 5,000 miles and touches two oceans — and both sides of the Atlantic.

Here’s a short but verrrrrrry interesting interview with Uma Thurman recently about sexual misconduct in Hollywood. Thurman’s most famous roles were in Weinstein/Tarantino productions, “Pulp Fiction” and the “Kill Bill” movies. Think she has anyone specific in mind when discussing her barely controllable rage? Don’t forget, it was allegedly on junkets to promote the “Kill Bill” movies that Weinstein harassed Thurman’s co-star, Daryl Hannah.

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David Strom 6:40 PM | April 18, 2024
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