As the jury began deliberating his rape retrial, Harvey Weinstein reported feeling chest pains, his lawyers said.
The 74-year-old disgraced movie mogul has an array of health problems and uses a wheelchair. Weinstein has been in prison since 2020.
Jurors started deliberating on Wednesday and are deciding whether he raped Jessica Mann, a hairstylist and actor, in a Manhattan hotel on March 18, 2013.
Weinstein reported feeling chest pains as court was ending early for the day after the jury awaited an answer to revisit some evidence.
Jurors had been deliberating for under four hours when they sent a note requesting to re-hear one page of accuser Mann’s testimony and get a copy of a lengthy PowerPoint file that prosecutors had created to put emails and other evidence in a timeline.
Defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo said court officers had told him Weinstein was having chest pains. No further information was immediately available.
Judge Curtis Farber sent jurors home about an hour earlier than normal, telling them only that there were “unforeseen reasons” for the change. Both the prosecutors and Weinstein’s lawyers had absented themselves from the courtroom, on the theory that the jury would be less likely to wonder why Weinstein wasn’t there.
Mann, 40, testified that the two had a consensual relationship, but that Weinstein subjected her to unwanted sex that day after she repeatedly said no.
Lawyers for Weinstein have maintained that the encounter was consensual, and they have emphasized that Mann continued seeing Weinstein afterward and expressing warmth toward him. Mann has said she was mired in complicated feelings about him, herself and what had happened and that she was “normalizing everything.”
Her viewpoint changed in 2017, when a series of sexual misconduct allegations against the Oscar-winning Weinstein propelled the #MeToo campaign to hold people — especially powerful men — accountable for sexual misbehavior. Weinstein has said he “acted wrongly” but never assaulted anyone.
Some of those accusations later generated criminal convictions against Weinstein in New York and California.
An appeals court overturned his 2020 New York conviction on charges that involved Mann and another accuser. At a retrial last year, jurors failed to reach a verdict on Mann’s portion of the case, leading to a second retrial this year. He is charged with one count of rape in the third degree.
The current jury heard nearly three weeks of testimony, five days of it from Mann. Weinstein decided not to testify.
