'I WAS AFRAID': HARVEY WEINSTEIN JURORS SPEAK AFTER MISTRIAL DECLARED
'WE TOOK AN OATH,' ONE JUROR SAID, 'YOU CAN'T BRING IN THINGS FROM THE STREET.'
Jurors from Harvey Weinstein’s sex assault re-trial speak to the press after a judge declared a mis-trial in the case. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
New York, New York: June 12, 2025 Last updated: 12:08am, June 13
A day after Harvey Weinstein was convicted of sexually assaulting one woman and acquitted of sexually assaulting a second woman, a judge declared a mistrial on a charge he raped a third woman in 2013.
"Deliberations became so heated I'm required to declare a mistrial," State Supreme Court justice Curtis Farber ordered on Thursday.
"Sometimes jury deliberations become heated," the judge explained. "This one was more heated than some others."
As The Free Lance reported yesterday, members of Weinstein's jury screamed at each other and threatened to fight it out on the street in front of the courthouse, according to a juror who said he was threatened by another juror and a third juror who said he witnessed it.
The jury’s foreman was the juror allegedly threatened, who was called Juror #1. He refused to continue deliberating with the rest of jury. When asked to explain himself by Justice Farber on Wednesday, he answered another juror was angered by his position in the jury deliberation room.
"He say, 'You don't know [me]. You gonna see me outside,’" Juror #1 said.
Arthur L. Aidala, Weinstein's chief defense lawyer, quoted lyrics from the rap group Cypress Hill’s hit 1993 song “Insane in the Brain” and called what happened among jurors "insane in the membrane.” He asked the judge to declare a mistrial on Thursday.
It was "a whole different level of insanity," Aidala alleged.
Before its deliberations broke down, the jury convicted Weinstein of forcing oral sex on Miriam Haley in 2006, but acquitted him of doing the same to Kaja Sokola, also in 2006. The jury deadlocked over a third charge he raped Jessica Mann in 2013.
That dispute caused much of the tension among jurors, three of them told The Free Lance outside the courtroom after the mistrial was formally declared.
A fourth juror, a black woman identified only by her last name, Jenings, said she was intimidated by other jurors. Jenings looked as though she belonged in a church on Sunday, not a courthouse—on any day of the week.
"I was afraid," the woman said. "The foreman was right for speaking up."
Jenings also revealed some jurors compared Weinstein to Sean "P-Diddy" Combs and said they needed to make "an example" out of Weinstein.
The embattled hip-hop and fashion impresario is currently on trial for sex trafficking in a federal courthouse across the street from the state courthouse where Weinstein is on trial. He’s being held without bail in a Brooklyn jail.
Explaining her decision to reveal previously-secret deliberations, juror Jenings said she was speaking because "We took an oath."
"You have to do what's legally right," she added. "You can't bring in things from the street."
The juror who allegedly invited the jury foreperson to a side-walk fist-fight was Juror #12. He acknowledged a dispute did in fact occur between them.
“Yeah, I’m the angry one,” Juror #12 admitted, with a small laugh. He added, "It was overblown."
A third juror, #9, accused the foreman of telling jurors they needed to wrap up their deliberations.
"You don't tell a juror, 'By two o'clock I want to get out of here, so you'all better have an acquittal,” she said.
But another juror, #7, told The Free Lance "I'm sure the foreman saw things he wanted to report. I agree with that."
"I mentioned it to someone else," he revealed, "there was a little, you know, … I agree with the foreman what he did."
Meanwhile, the jury foreman, Juror #1, himself was sped out of the courthouse by court officers while other court officers kept reporters locked in the courtroom when Justice Farber declared a mistrial. By the time court officers let reporters leave the court room, Juror #1 was gone, a witness on the street outside confirmed.
Prosecutors said they would re-try Weinstein for allegedly raping Mann.
“It’s about the survivors,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. He added: “The jury was not able to reach a conclusion as to Ms. Mann, and she deserves that.”
Aidala, Weinstein’s lead lawyer, vowed to fight on: “This is not over.”
He said the defense would ask the judge to vacate Weinstein’s conviction for sexully assaulting Haley. Referring to the jurors’ statements outside the courtroom after the mistrial, Aidala said there is “very powerful evidence that there was gross juror misconduct at this trial."
At the end of the day, Juror #7 said, three different sets of allegations against three different women was simply too much work for the jury to do.
“I think all of the jurors would agree,” he said, “three cases at once? You know, we can’t …”
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