The first witness called by the defence in the Harvey Weinstein sex assault trial seemed to do more for the prosecution.
“Yes,” a seemingly flustered Mr Feldsher answered the prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon. The longtime Weinstein pal been called to the stand so he could blunt actress Annabella Sciorra’s tearful, blistering testimony from last month, in which she described being raped and then threatened by the producer in the early ’90s.
On direct testimony, Mr Feldsher did bolster Weinstein’s case to some degree, telling jurors that the actress recounted the incident to him during a long walk soon after the alleged attack — and that she had downplayed it, saying only, “she’d done this crazy thing with Harvey”. But confronted with his texts to Weinstein later Thursday, during cross-examination, Mr Feldsher appeared to do far more harm to his old pal than good. The texts, which were not entered into evidence or shown to jurors, were written by Mr Feldsher to Weinstein since the Fall of 2018. “Did you also say to Harvey Weinstein that your appetite and ambition for the things you want — a script, a movie, and yes, a girl — to put it mildly, is voracious,” the prosecutor asked.“What I meant by that was Harvey was very dogged in his pursuit of projects and material, etc., etc.,” he attempted to explain.“Yes,” the witness answered. When Ms Illuzzi-Orbon asked Mr Feldsher what he had meant in his text when he called Weinstein “voracious” with “girls,” the witness continued to unwittingly rough up the defendant’s character. “I meant that it was my understanding for a very long time that Harvey had a sex addiction and that he dated a lot of women,” Mr Feldsher told jurors. The prosecutor continued: “Then you go on to say, ‘if a lot of these girls had been my daughter, I’d want to beat the s**t out of you’. Is that right?”“That’s correct,” Mr Feldsher answered.“Um, I think I was trying — I mean, obviously, because any of — the thought of my child, my daughter is 13, so the thought of anyone, anything in that context I find abhorrent at this point,” he testified. “And I guess I was trying to put into context — look, I was trying to be a friend and to say I know the extremes of your personality. I know the extremes of your appetite. But I did not believe that he was capable of the thing that he had been charged with.”“I believe he had a voracious appetite that I spoke of and, I think, yes, also applied to his appetite for women.” The jurors listened intently as Ms Illuzzi-Orbon got Mr Feldsher to concede that, in another text, he’d referred to Weinstein’s accusers as a “dog pile of actresses”. “Did you say, sir, ‘I think the dogpile of actresses who are suddenly brave and recalling suppressed memories is hideous’?”“I meant a plethora — I was not referring to the animal, I just was talking about the number.”and was reproduced with permission.
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