Jury selection begins in Harvey Weinstein’s latest Manhattan rape trial

The third New York trial over Harvey Weinstein’s alleged rape of Jessica Mann opened with a narrower case, a new jury pool and a far more constrained legal playbook than the one that produced his overturned conviction.

Jury selection began Tuesday, April 14, in Manhattan Supreme Court before Judge Curtis Farber, as prosecutors from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office tried again to persuade jurors that Weinstein raped hairstylist and actor Jessica Mann in a Manhattan hotel in 2013. Unlike the broader earlier proceedings, this trial centers on a single rape charge, with the district attorney’s office stripping the case down to one allegation after the state’s highest court ordered a do-over.

That reset came in April 2024, when the New York Court of Appeals overturned Weinstein’s 2020 conviction. The court said the trial judge improperly allowed testimony from women whose allegations were not part of the charged conduct, concluding that “the trial court erroneously admitted testimony” about uncharged prior sexual acts. For prosecutors, the ruling sharply changed the contours of one of the most closely watched sex-crime cases of the #MeToo era: the challenge is no longer only proving the accusation against Weinstein, but doing so without the evidentiary overreach that doomed the earlier verdict.

It is Weinstein’s third New York trial on the Mann allegation. A previous retrial ended in a mistrial after jurors could not reach a verdict, and the judge later declared a mistrial amid a jury-room dispute. That history gives the latest proceeding unusual weight, both for the prosecution’s ability to translate a damaged case into a clean one and for the defense’s effort to show that the first conviction was not simply flawed, but unrecoverable.

Weinstein remains imprisoned on other convictions, including a 2022 Los Angeles case, even as the Manhattan prosecution continues to carry outsized symbolic force. Since allegations against him burst into public view in 2017, he has remained a central figure in the reckoning over sexual misconduct in powerful institutions. His lawyers, led by Marc Agnifilo, have argued that the new trial should not be treated as a replay of the broader earlier cases, and that argument now sits at the center of a retrial that tests how much of the #MeToo-era legal response can survive appellate scrutiny.