One day after the woman who has said that Harvey Weinstein raped her in Manhattan in 2013 broke down on the witness stand, she returned to describe how she continued to have sexual encounters with the Hollywood producer years after the alleged attack.
Jessica Mann, who on Monday collapsed in sobs after defense lawyer Donna Rotunno asked her about sexual abuse earlier in her life, prompting the judge to end the day an hour early, was back on the stand on Tuesday for her third day of cross-examination.
‘IT’S IRRELEVANT’
Rotunno, highlighting inconsistencies in Mann’s testimony and gaps in her memory, showed Mann and the jury dozens of e-mails, some fond or effusive, that Mann sent Weinstein as an aspiring actor from 2013 through 2017.
The lawyer noted that Mann had asked Weinstein for a reference to join a private club in Los Angeles.
“You want the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to know” that she asked for a reference from “your rapist?” Rotunno asked Mann.
“I do want the jury to know that he is my rapist, and I hope I can continue to explain the dynamic of why I engaged with him,” Mann said. “I mean, he raped me. It’s irrelevant.”
Mann, 34, is the fifth accuser to testify at Weinstein’s New York state trial. Weinstein, 67, has been charged with rape and predatory sexual assault for alleged attacks on Mann and Miriam Haley, and could go to prison for the rest of his life if convicted.
He has maintained that the encounters were consensual.
MENTAL ILLNESS?
At one point on Tuesday, Rotunno asked Mann whether she had been diagnosed with “mixed depressed mood and anxiety disorder.”
Mann acknowledged a “panic disorder” and said that she had had “suicidal thoughts,” and had been “depressed” and “engaged in self-harm.”
Asked if she had been diagnosed with “borderline personality disorder,” she said no.
“Have you expressed anger?” Rotunno asked.
“Are you my psychiatrist?” Mann asked in return.
Mann, who grew up in an evangelical family on a dairy farm in Washington state and left home as a teenager to try her hand at acting, on Friday last week told the panel that Weinstein raped her at the DoubleTree Hotel in midtown Manhattan in March 2013 after a consensual relationship that did not include intercourse.
SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP
On Tuesday, Rotunno brought up Mann’s continued encounters with Weinstein, including at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where Mann has said that he raped her again, in late 2013, after she told him she was dating an actor, enraging him.
Four years later, in April 2017, Mann e-mailed Weinstein, saying: “I feel so fabulous and beautiful THANK YOU FOR EVERYTHING!”
Rotunno asked Mann if she was thanking him for a sex act.
Mann said that nothing of the kind had happened at the time of the e-mail.
“The last sexual tryst situation I remember with him was when his mom died” in November 2016, Mann said.
She told the jury his staff reached out to her, saying that Weinstein was grief-stricken and needed her to console him.
Mann said that she went to see him at his hotel.
“When I got there he was naked on the bed and all he wanted to do is something sexual,” she said, telling the jurors that she agreed to an encounter that she limited to oral sex.
Late on Tuesday, Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi showed the jury nude photographs of Weinstein, apparently to confirm characteristics of his body described by some of the witnesses, such as a scar Mann said that she saw.
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