Four high-profile sexual misconduct trials are currently underway in the US as Hollywood confronts its dark underbelly yet again in the #MeToo age.
Convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein’s Los Angeles trial for sex offences including rape and battery is expected to begin next week. The disgraced former film mogul is currently in prison in Los Angeles awaiting the hearing on 11 counts of sexual assault, including forcible rape and sexual battery.
There are five complainants, one of whom is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom. He has pleaded not guilty to Los Angeles Superior Court in Downtown Los Angeles in September. If found guilty he faces 135 years to life in prison.
Weinstein, 70, is currently serving a 23-year sentence in a New York state prison for third-degree rape and first-degree sexual assault handed down in March 2020.
Meanwhile Kevin Spacey, 63, the actor whose roles included the US President in Netflix series House Of Cards as well as American Beauty and The Usual Suspects, is at the centre of a $40m Lower Manhattan civil trial brought by Star Trek: Discovery actor Anthony Rapp. The plaintiff said he was 14 when the alleged sexual misconduct took place in 1986. Spacey denies any impropriety and closing arguments are expected to begin on Thursday.
Paul Haggis, who won Oscars for producing and writing Crash, is in the dock in a Lower Manhattan civil jury trial in which he stands accused of raping publicist Haleigh Breest at his Soho apartment in 2013. Haggis, 69, said the pair had consensual sex but added that the rape allegation came in retaliation to his decision to leave the Church of Scientology in 2009 over its opposition to gay marriage.
In the words of his attorney, the filmmaker did “not leave quietly”. However Breest’s lawyers said she had no connection to Scientology and the case is unrelated to the church. Haggis’s defence team claim that Breest is attempting extortion. Haggis, who said in an interview with The New Yorker in 2011 that he expected there would be some allegation following his departure from the church, faces a damages award should he lose.
That ’70s Show actor Danny Masterson, 46, is accused of raping three women between 2001 and 2003 and stands trial in the same building as Weinstein at Los Angeles Superior Court. Masterson and the three complainants are current or former Scientologists. He has pleaded not guilty and faces 45 years in prison if convicted.
Cuba Gooding Jr., 54, recently avoided jail in a forcible touching case involving multiple women after the best supporting actor Oscar winner for Jerry Maguire in 1997 pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and agreed to abide by a conditional plea bargain deal struck last spring.
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