What’s changed for the world’s Harvey Weinsteins? The Jennifer Siebel Newsoms won’t hush

Decades ago, backstage at a Democratic fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall, I saw Julia Roberts run to Harvey Weinstein, laughing as she leapt, and throw her legs around his waist. His “Shakespeare in Love” had won the Academy Award for best picture the previous year, and at the time, most reporters were being only slightly less friendly than Roberts, though not many of us can jump that high.

In prosecutor Paul Thompson’s opening statement in a Los Angeles courtroom on Monday, he said that the eight women who will testify against Weinstein regarded him as “the most powerful person in the industry,” and “the king” of Hollywood when he assaulted them in the years between 2004 and 2013.

These days, Weinstein is someone who — unless he’s acting, of course — has to struggle to get out of his wheelchair and into the seat next to his defense team. His lawyers may, as they signaled during pretrial hearings, question whether he was physically capable of some of the sex acts in question.

But in the two and a half years since he was sentenced to 23 years behind bars in New York, the former producer isn’t the only one whose strength and standing have ebbed. #MeToo has all but evaporated, and the hard-won realization that most women have been violated at some point has after a season or two gone out of style.

#MeToo is now a movie, rather than a movement. Bill Cosby is a free man, and Weinstein might soon be, too, since he’s appealing his New York sentence.

Prosecutors tell me that it’s no easier to get a rape conviction than it ever was, and it’s always been next to impossible. Victims are treated no less shamefully now. So has anything changed?

I think so, even if it’s only this: Fewer victims are too embarrassed to tell the truth about what happened to them, no matter what that truth costs them.

One of the brave women stepping up to accuse Weinstein in open court is Jennifer Siebel Newsom, wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The public still all too often assumes that victims are looking for money; she has plenty, and this is a criminal trial. Or wait, maybe it’s attention that she’s looking for? Siebel Newsom has plenty of that, too, and no well person wants this kind of attention.

That every one of Weinstein’s accusers is willing to be vilified for coming forward is admirable; as usual, there isn’t any upside to doing so, other than knowing that you did what you could to seek justice. But as I wrote last week, it’s extraordinary that a person with so much to lose is nonetheless willing to take the stand.

Thompson says that each of the women who will testify “came forward independent of each other, and none of them knew one another.”

Yet they all told similar stories to their loved ones — and in one case to acclaimed actor, director and antisemite Mel Gibson — years before the Weinstein scandal broke.

‘She was a powerless actor’

Thompson said that when Siebel Newsom met the producer 17 years ago, “she was a powerless actor trying to make her way in Hollywood.”

After they met at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, she invited him to a big party at her house. Then he invited her to “discuss her career” at the Peninsula Hotel.

Siebel Newsom assumed they’d be meeting in the hotel’s restaurant until a Weinstein aide let her know that the appointment was being moved to his hotel suite.

She showed up, sat on a couch and waited for Weinstein, who arrived with five or six other people. “But to her surprise,” Thompson said, his aides suddenly disappeared, almost as if it had been prearranged, leaving her “nervous and uncertain of how to navigate this situation with one of the most powerful people in Hollywood.”

(As sick as Weinstein is, I’d love to hear how those of you whose job it was to disappear on cue, and leave him alone with his prey, could possibly justify your complicity.)

Soon, Weinstein reappeared in a bathrobe and asked Siebel Newsom to touch him. “She was shocked,” and refused, Thompson said, even as he ticked off “a list of A-List actresses whose careers he supposedly made and his voice moved from pleading to aggressive and demanding.”

She was crying and shaking when he forced her into bed, Thompson said: “She couldn’t get any words out because of her fear.”

He raped her, according to the prosector, and “in the years after the assault,” she felt she had “no choice” but to stay in contact with him.

When she began dating Newsom a year later, she didn’t immediately tell him about it, though she had already told two female friends.

Hey, but lucky her; at least she hadn’t been pulled into bed by her hair, as another Weinstein victim will testify that she was. Nor was she raped over the bathroom sink after she “tried to show him pictures of her kids” to get him to stop.

Weinstein’s lawyers countered that Siebel Newsom and others had transactional but consensual sex with him. Defense attorney Mark Werksman said she faked an orgasm during the alleged assault.

Years later, Werksman said, “She brought her husband to meet and party with the man who raped her,” and asked him to donate to his political campaigns. “Who does that?”

“Now look at him,” Weinstein’s attorney told the jury. “He’s not Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Do you think those beautiful women had sex with him because he’s hot? No. They did it because he was powerful.” Then, out of nowhere, “an asteroid called the #MeToo movement hit earth with such ferocity that everything changed overnight.”

Did it? Post-#MeToo, it’s still the victims as well as the defendant who will be on trial in the court of public opinion.

After I wrote last week to commend Siebel Newsom for taking this on at great risk to herself and her ambitious husband, one of several Bee readers who felt otherwise and wrote to tell me about it said, “What a pathetic joke dear! Please explain to us in your next article how all of these ‘innocent’ sweethearts managed to get ‘raped’ by men who are extremely wealthy and have the power to get these gals into lucrative positions in Hollywood, politics, or a number of other higher earning positions. Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”

Since you asked, no. But to be willing to put up with this fevered falderal, only to support other victims, does grow my respect for both Newsoms. The governor’s wife knew that she’d be accused of consenting, of seeking favors and even of pretending to enjoy her assault, yet she’s going forward anyway.

Werksman told the jury they’d soon “learn that in Hollywood, sex was a commodity,” and that Weinstein’s actions were part of an accepted “casting couch culture.” That predatory culture was neither consensual nor unique to Hollywood, Mr. Werksman.

And we have yet to see whether the “asteroid” that was #MeToo put the culture of coercion in the past tense.

This story was originally published October 25, 2022 at 5:30 AM.