Tag: harvey weinstein
Harvey Weinstein slapped with federal lawsuit by accuser
Disgraced Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein has been slapped with a federal lawsuit by his accuser, Mimi Haleyi on Friday.
The former Project Runway production assistant filed new court documents and described how Weinstein used “his wealth, power and influence to pull her into his orbit.”
Restating her stance from her testimony in the sexual assault trial against him—which helped put the rapist behind bars—Haleyi said she was lured into his apartment by him in 2006 and was sexually assaulted.
Her lawyers wrote in the filing: “Ms. Haley lived with the horror, humiliation and pain that this assault caused for years.”
Haleyi recalls meeting him again weeks later as she was in desperate need of work and “he was an extremely useful industry connection.”
Weinstein is currently serving his 23-year prison sentence since he was convicted of first-degree criminal sex act earlier this year.
Article via GeoTV
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A Texas Lawyer and an Open Secret: How Harvey Weinstein’s Charity Fraud Led to His Downfall
For the first time, attorney Tom Ajamie opens up about his pro bono investigation into questionable practices at amfAR that led to the disgraced movie mogul’s demise.
In January 2017, Tom Ajamie sat in a luxury hotel suite at Main & Sky in Park City when Harvey Weinstein came bounding in for an awkward face-to-face meeting. The Houston-based financial fraud attorney had been hired by the amfAR board to investigate a suspect transaction involving Weinstein. Ajamie had recently submitted his eight-page confidential report, the details of which Weinstein appeared to know well. But as the two-hour meeting kicked off, the Oscar-winning producer was focused on a different subject entirely.
“He began screaming at me, ‘You’re telling everyone I rape women. You’re causing problems for me. I have a very good reputation. And you’re the source of all these rumors’,” Ajamie recalls. “Harvey was manic. One minute he’d be yelling, and then he would calm down. He was all over the place. Yelling, screaming, cajoling, begging, trying to explain, often talking in circles, confused, not confused, justifying his actions — ‘I slept with dozens and dozens of women, and you know they all won Academy Awards’.”
Fast-forward three years, and Weinstein is now a convicted rapist and has been bouncing around New York correctional facilities amid health issues. Although Ajamie’s amfAR investigation never received the same level of attention as Weinstein’s sexual predation, it remains the key event that led to his downfall. After all, it was during the eight-month inquiry, which Ajamie’s firm did pro bono, that he learned of Weinstein’s open secret.
“Everyone I interviewed started off by saying things like, ‘You know he’s a sexual predator, right?’ as opposed to jumping right to this issue of financial transactions,” Ajamie says. “As a lawyer who’s done dozens of these investigations, it was very odd.”
At Main & Sky, he faced off with Weinstein — Ajamie, the Hollywood outsider, was unimpressed with the mogul’s name-dropping. (Weinstein was in Sundance with Jay-Z for the premiere of their TV series Time: The Kalief Browder Story, and days earlier, it was reported that Malia Obama would intern for him.) Attorney Lisa Bloom, who arranged the meeting, was the only other person present.
Near the end of the meeting, Weinstein leaned close to Ajamie and told him to sign an NDA. “He said, ‘David Boies wants you to sign this nondisclosure. You have to keep everything you learned about me secret,’ ” recalls Ajamie.
He refused. Soon after, he was contacted by New York Times writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. “I told them what I was able to tell them,” he says. The rest is history.
On a cold February day in Manhattan, the maitre d’ at Fleming greets Ajamie by name. The 59-year-old lawyer splits his time between Houston and New York. Days earlier, he won a $79 million class-action settlement against Wells Fargo on behalf of former financial advisers who said they were forced to forfeit deferred compensation when they left the company. Though he rarely intersects with Hollywood, Ajamie says power lawyer Howard Weitzman served as a mentor. They first met in the early ’90s in a case against Time Warner. Ajamie was a young litigator who wanted to learn the art of trying a case.
“We were co-counsel and have been friends ever since,” says Weitzman. “Tom was young, smart, a willing student and had great energy. He became a dynamic and successful trial lawyer. But more importantly, he has integrity, and it came as no surprise to me that his amfAR investigation ultimately exposed Harvey Weinstein.”
Ajamie has also represented the band Duran Duran for the past six years.
“If you have a complex problem to solve, Tom has a great instinct and acts with laser precision,” says the band’s Nick Rhodes. “He’s an inspired conversationalist and we have laughed endlessly together. I know it doesn’t sound as though I am describing one of the toughest litigators out there, but he truly does have a wonderfully balanced view of the bizarre world we live in.”
Having won more than $1 billion in awards and settlements, his practice is booming. But Ajamie is passionate about donating his time in the nonprofit sector, as he has done with the Sundance Institute for some 15 years and with amfAR since March 2016.
As he dug into Weinstein’s activities, he discovered that at the 2015 amfAR benefit in Cannes, Weinstein struck a deal with then-chairman Kenneth Cole in which Weinstein would auction off two items on the condition that the money be split, with $600,000 going to the American Repertory Theater. Separately, ART promised to reimburse Weinstein for staging the producer’s for-profit play Finding Neverland so long as third parties donated $600,000 to the theater by June 1 of that year. The auction items fetched far less than $1.2 million, but Weinstein still pushed amfAR to wire $600,000 to ART by June 1, even though amfAR had not yet received the donations. Cole acquiesced, to the horror of other board members, some of whom stepped down.
In fall of 2016, Ajamie submitted his report to the board. Some sent it to reporters and the New York attorney general, while at least one other gave it to Weinstein, who already was working with Bloom, both as her client and on a Trayvon Martin project based on her book Suspicion Nation. But Ajamie had no knowledge of that relationship when Bloom — whom he had met only months before, while investigating Weinstein — suggested the three meet in Sundance. Per Ajamie, who travels to the fest annually, Bloom said she bumped into Weinstein at the Kalief Browder premiere party, Ajamie’s name came up, and Weinstein asked for a meeting.
“The clear impression she gave to me was she didn’t know him,” he says. “At this point I’m still thinking she’s a hardcore women’s rights advocate.”
Around the same time as that Main & Sky meeting, Cole began agitating for a new investigation into the transaction and hired Gibson Dunn & Crutcher. Unlike Ajamie’s firm, which did $2 million worth of work basically for free (it collected about $40,000 to cover expenses), Gibson Dunn was charging. After a $1 million investigation (the bill was later reduced to $450,000), the firm found the transaction was acceptable.
“It is blatantly wrong,” Ajamie says. “They looked at the issue very narrowly. There’s no way that money raised in a fundraiser for AIDS research is ethical or legal to cast through several entities and give it back to Harvey.” (A Gibson Dunn rep says, “After a thorough review, we concluded and reported to the board that this contribution was a lawful charitable donation to ART.”)
On Feb. 7, 2017, Gibson Dunn shot off an email to Ajamie that said: “We demand that you immediately cease and desist from communication with any and all third parties and individual amfAR board members about any issues you ‘investigated’ since March 2016, including but not limited to any issues regarding Mr. Weinstein.” (An amfAR board member tells THR it declined to sign a similar NDA.)
But the genie was out of the bottle. And perhaps it was only fitting that the subject of Twohey’s first story on Weinstein — published 12 days before the jaw-dropping Oct. 5, 2017, sexual misconduct exposé she wrote with Kantor — was about the amfAR transaction.
***
On Feb. 24, Weinstein was convicted of third-degree rape and a first-degree criminal sexual act. Ajamie was with clients in Phoenix when the news flashed across his phone.
“I looked down, didn’t skip a beat, looked right back up and continued the meeting,” he says. “I expected a guilty verdict against Harvey Weinstein. Clearly what Harvey was accused of was exactly what I had been hearing during the course of my investigation.”
Still, the question looms: If Weinstein hadn’t been greedy and didn’t push to be reimbursed the $600,000 from ART, would he be a free man?
“I don’t know,” Ajamie says after some thought. “For the first time that I’m aware of, someone stood up and challenged him aggressively, me and my legal team. We raised a lot of issues — suspicious, sleazy, unethical behavior — and wrote it up. Everyone else kind of swept it under the rug.”
Article via HollywoodReporter
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Jury selected for Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial
Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assault trial in New York now has a jury. The 12-person panel, consisting of seven men and five women, was seated Friday. The disgraced movie mogul is accused of raping a woman in 2013, and sexually assaulting another woman in 2006. Weinstein denies the allegations and has pleaded not guilty. Attorney Jesse Weber joined CBSN with more.
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Taraji P. Henson faces backlash after comparing R. Kelly to Harvey Weinstein
Article via PageSix
Taraji P. Henson sparked outrage and confusion after she compared the use of the #MuteRKelly hashtag to #MuteWeinstein and #MuteHarveyWeinstein.
In since-deleted Instagram story posts, the “Empire” star called out the lack of posts calling for the muting of the disgraced Hollywood mogul, who is set to stand trial in May for sexual assault; however, the #MuteRKelly hashtag went viral after Lifetime’s docu-series, “Surviving R. Kelly,” which followed the stories of several victims who accused “The World’s Greatest” crooner of sexual abuse and predation.
Confused Twitter users came forward to call out Henson, who they believed missed the entire point of the hashtags.
“So if mute Weinstein had just as many posts as Rkelly would that change Taraji’s opinion I’m confused,” asked one Twitter user.
“‘Mute R Kelly’ is an actual campaign with an accompanying hashtag. There is no such Harvey Weinstein hashtag so there’s no point to be made here, Taraji. As if Weinstein still has the public’s support. This is disappointing af.
Even the executive producer of “Surviving R. Kelly,” Dream Hampton, chimed in on the conversation.
“No idea why Taraji Henson wouldn’t know that there are not one, but two projects abt Harvey Weinstein. But this is an oft-invoked deflection. While I care abt the Hollywood stars Weinstein abused, I care more abt Asante, Kitty, Jerhona, Lisette, Azriel & Joy & others, even more,” Hampton tweeted. “Plus Weinstein is on trial. For rape.”
Another user compared Henson to Erykah Badu, who over the weekend seemingly defended R. Kelly’s actions.
“Erykah Badu reduced R.Kelly’s crimes to ‘poor choices’. Taraji P. Henson made a false equivalency between him and Harvey Weinstein. The aunties are really exposing their internalized misogynoir, and I can’t deal,” tweeted another. “Black girls deserve better.”
Eventually, Henson tried to clarify the message her Instagram stories were intended to relay.
“LET ME BE CLEAR R. KELLY IS GUILTY AND WRONG AND SHOULD BE MUTED PERIOD!!!!! ,” she wrote.
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Harvey Weinstein lawyers ask for case dismissal citing text from accuser
Lawyers for disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein asked a judge Monday to toss the remains of the criminal case against him — revealing for the first time that one of the accusers tried to meet with him soon after she claims he abused her.
Production assistant Mimi Haleyi alleged in a press conference last year that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her in his SoHo home in 2006.
According to the motion, on Feb. 12, 2007, she allegedly texted Weinstein’s phone: “Hi! Just wondering if u have any news on whether harvey will have time to see me before he leaves? x Miriam.”
“This message makes clear that Mimi Haleyi wished to continue seeing Mr. Weinstein even after the alleged sexual assault,” defense attorney Ben Brafman wrote in the filing.
He blasts prosecutors for not presenting this communication to the grand jury.
The Haleyi text is the latest dent in the Manhattan District Attorney’s rapidly crumbling sex abuse case against the former film industry giant.
She is one of two victims whose allegations are still propping up the indictment. The second victim, who hasn’t been publicly identified, alleges that Weinstein raped her in March 2013.
A judge last month dismissed the felony count related to a third victim, Lucia Evans, over spiraling credibility worries.
Evans, who was once considered the strongest part of the case, accused Weinstein of forcing her to perform oral sex on him in 2004 in his Tribeca office when she was a fledgling actress.
But prosecutors eventually uncovered an exculpatory email she wrote to her husband that suggested that the encounter was consensual.
She also told a friend that the act was not coerced. Evans allegedly told a pal that she gave Weinstein oral sex in exchange for an acting job, according to Joan Illuzzi-Orbon.
The friend said she described her recollections to lead detective Nicholas DiGaudio – but that he pressured her not to disclose the information.
DiGaudio was kicked off the case for alleged misconduct.
A few weeks later, Illuzzi-Orbon disclosed that the same detective coached the second victim to “delete anything she did not want anyone to see” from her phone before turning it over to authorities.
DiGaudio has denied the allegations.
Brafman argues in the latest motion that the entire case has been irreversibly contaminated by DiGaudio’s conduct and Evans’ alleged “perjury.”
The attorney also questioned the credibility of the second victim, who had a “long-term, consensual” relationship with Weinstein, which continued after she alleges he raped her March 18, 2013, in a Manhattan hotel.
In an email sent nearly four years later, she allegedly wrote: “I love you, always do. But I hate feeling like a booty call :)”
These communications, the lawyer says, were also not presented to the grand jury.
Article via PageSix
Harvey Weinstein accused of sexually assaulting 16-year-old virgin
An aspiring actress says she was a 16-year-old virgin when disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted her in New York, according to an amended Manhattan federal racketeering lawsuit filed Wednesday.
The woman, a former model from Poland identified only as Jane Doe in the court papers, said that after agreeing to meet for a business lunch in 2002, Weinstein instead took her to his Soho apartment.
“…Weinstein wasted no time in aggressively and threateningly demanding sex,” the suit alleges. He told the distraught starlet that if she wanted to be an actress she had to give in to his perverted desires.
“Weinstein threatened and pressured Jane Doe, saying that he had ‘made’ the careers of Penelope Cruz and Gwyneth Paltrow, and that neither would be working without him,” the suit alleges.
“He then took off his pants and forcibly held Jane Doe while taking her hand and making her touch and massage his penis,” the filing states.
Weinstein allegedly became enraged when the terrified teen objected and refused to let her leave — but eventually relented, the suit says.
The underage catwalker had just met Weinstein three days earlier at a soiree for her modeling agency Next.
After picking her up in his car for what she thought was a business lunch, she told him she was only 16, the papers say.
The pervy producer pursued the model for the next decade, getting her an extra role in the “Nanny Diaries” in 2004 — but she continued to resist his demands for sex.
In a 2008 after-hours meeting in his Greenwich Street office to arrange for her to sign with the modeling agency Marilyn, Weinstein spotted Christina Aguilera on a nearby TV and allegedly said, “‘Wow, I’d really like to f—k that p—-y’ then unzipped his pants and began touching his penis,” the filing states. Jane Doe fled the room.
But later she continued to discuss her career with Weinstein, including trying out for “Project Runway.”
Weinstein “ensured she never received work” because she refused to hop into bed with him, she alleges. The abuse and harassment left her depressed and exacerbated her anorexia, the suit says.
She is the 10th victim to join the class action lawsuit against Weinstein, the Weinstein Company and Miramax, accusing them of assault, battery and racketeering.
The women all claim that Weinstein lured them to hotels and auditions under the guise of furthering their careers and sexually assaulted or raped them.
The suit, filed by firm Hagens Berman, says that the companies, which it calls the “Weinstein Sexual Enterprise,” were aware of the producer’s alleged illegal conduct and enabled it by threatening victims and paying them off.
In September, a federal judge instructed three women — Melissa Thompson, Caitlin Dulany and Larissa Gomez — to consolidate their suit with six other class-action plaintiffs —Louisette Geiss, Katherine Kendall, Zoe Brock, Sarah Ann Thomas, Melissa Sagemiller and Nannette Klatt.
The new complaint, filed Wednesday, added plaintiff Jane Doe, describing her disturbing allegations for the first time.
Weinstein’s civil lawyer, Elior Shiloh, declined to comment.
“This claim is preposterous,” said Weinstein’s criminal lawyer Ben Brafman. “Like so many other women in this case who have already been exposed as liars, this latest completely uncorroborated allegation that is almost 20 years old will also be shown to be patently false.”
Article via PageSix
Amber Rose Doubles Down On Wishing Bill Cosby Death And Reveals She Was Sexually Assaulted By Someone Famous In Another Instagram Rant
Opinions are split when it comes to Bill Cosby’s recent sentencing. Amber Rose was one of the first celebrities to publicly celebrate the prison sentence to which she received a lot of backlash for doing so.
The model took to Instagram to say that she hoped that the comedian would die while serving his time behind bars.
Some fans felt that Rose was taking it too far by wishing death on someone. Her post was deleted but she came back on the morning of September 30 to double down on what she said.
The mom posted a photo that read: ‘So if your momma came to you and said “this guy raped me 36 years ago’ would you be asking for proof?”
She accompanied the picture with a caption that read: “No you wouldn’t. So stfu. Everyone said ‘Awwww poor Bill Cosby, he’s gonna die in the first 2 years of his sentence’ But I said ‘I hope he serves the full 10 years then dies’ I’m wrong and wishing death on him? FOH Stand up for a Rapist if y’all want to. I said what the f*** I said PS the only reason s*** was deleted on the last Bill Cosby post is cuz you can’t put our “pres” name and “die” in the same caption or FB will f*** ur algorithm up and I’ll be d***** if I let two sexual predators f*** with my money.”
After someone commented that she should ‘keep the same energy with Harvey Weinstein,’ she reiterated that she feels the same way about all rapists and revealed that she was sexually assaulted by someone famous but is scared to name who it was because she doesn’t want her family to be harassed.
Amber is currently preparing for her annual Slutwalk.
Article via: Amber Rose Doubles Down On Wishing Bill Cosby Death
Bill Cosby’s Star Won’t Be Removed From Hollywood Walk Of Fame
HOLLYWOOD (CBSLA/AP) – Despite being sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, Bill Cosby’s star will not be removed from the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In a statement Tuesday to CBS2, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce said it “does not remove stars from the Walk of Fame” because they “are intended to be permanent.”
“The stars only commemorate the recipient’s professional accomplishments,” the chamber wrote. “It is regrettable when the personal lives of inductees do not measure up to public standards and expectations.”
This comes after a petition was submitted Monday demanding that Cosby’s star be pulled. The chamber has never removed a star from the Walk of Fame and turned down a 2015 request to remove Cosby’s star when the sexual assault allegations against him first began to surface.
Not everyone shared the Chamber of Commerce’s view after Cosby’s sentencing Tuesday.
A Pennsylvania judge Tuesday sentenced Bill Cosby to 3 to 10 years in prison for three felony counts of aggravated indecent assault. The judge also declared him a sexually violent predator.
In April, Cosby was found guilty of sexually assaulting Temple University women’s basketball administrator Andrea Constand at his estate near Philadelphia in 2004.
“It is time for justice. Mr. Cosby, this has all circled back to you. The time has come,” Montgomery County Judge Steven O’Neill said. He quoted from Constand’s own statement to the court, in which she said Cosby took her “beautiful, young spirit and crushed it.”
O’Neill also denied Bill Cosby bail, ordering him to be locked up immediately.
(© Copyright 2018 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
Article via: Bill Cosby’s Star Won’t Be Removed From Hollywood Walk Of Fame
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Asia Argento’s attorney says 17-year-old sexually ‘attacked’ her
In a lengthy letter posted to his website on Wednesday, Asia Argento’s attorney disputes allegations from actor Jimmy Bennett that his client sexually assaulted Bennett in 2013.
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