The disgraced and incarcerated film producer, Harvey Weinstein, was wheeled into a courtroom at Manhattan criminal court on Wednesday morning. The judge who presides over his case agreed to consolidate his trial on new “criminal sexual act” charges with his retrial on previous criminal sexual act and rape charges into one trial, which will be held next year. Weinstein’s defense attorney, Arthur Aidala, announced that he would hire a private investigator to investigate the new charges.     

“We’re going to need some time to investigate the case, hire a private investigator and dig more into discovery,” Mr. Aidala said on Wednesday, after the judge had granted the prosecution its request to consolidate the charges.

In September, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, announced a new indictment against the film producer, 72, charging him with a first-degree criminal sexual act for allegedly assaulting an unnamed woman between April and May 2006.

After Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Aidala told reporters that the defense had not been officially told the new accuser’s identity. 

The Associated Press reported that one of the accuser’s attorneys, Lindsay Goldbrum, “previously said the woman has never made her accusation public and doesn’t want to be identified for now, though she ‘will be fully prepared to speak her truth at trial.’” 

The new indictment, which was sealed until Weinstein’s arraignment on September 18, included “alleged sexual assaults at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, now known as the Roxy Hotel, and in a Lower Manhattan residential building between late 2005 and mid-2006, and an alleged sexual assault at a Tribeca hotel in May 2016,” Associated Press wrote. 

After the hearing, Mr. Aidala lamented, “It’s much of the same where for years, decades, it’s been consensual, and then as of late, it’s not consensual.” He was referring to the other sexual crimes his client has been accused of, which the defense argues were consensual sexual acts.  

The prosecution had requested to combine the new charges with his older charges, which were originally scheduled for a retrial on November 12, after Weinstein’s conviction was overturned by New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals in April. 

In 2020, Weinstein was convicted of committing a first-degree criminal sexual act and of third-degree rape and sentenced to 23 years in prison. He was accused of raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann in 2013 and forcibly performing an oral sex on TV and film production assistant, Miriam Haley, in 2006. The Court of Appeals found that the trial judge had wrongly allowed testimony against Weinstein based on allegations from other women that were not part of the case, including “Sopranos” star Annabella Sciorra, and vacated the guilty verdict and ordered a new trial.    

On Wednesday, Judge Faber ruled that this retrial would now be combined with the new charges, writing in his decision, “The offenses charged in the separate indictments before this Court are joinable… Specifically, both indictments charge the defendant  with sex crimes… and more specifically, both indictments contain one count of the exact same statutory offense – Criminal Sexual Act in the First Degree.” 

The accusations against Weinstein first made in a New York Times investigation in 2017, set off the #metoo movement which brought down numerous powerful men, mostly in the media business, who had previously been immune to consequences for their treatment of women in the workplace. Hundreds women began speaking out against the sexual abuse they had quietly endured for decades. Weinstein’s fall – he had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, but was on the decline prior to his fall – was especially spectacular.

Weinstein has denied all allegations. In total, he has been charged in two indictments for three sex crimes in New York. But he also faced charges in Los Angeles, California and Great Britain.  

In 2022, Weinstein was convicted in Los Angeles for rape, forced oral copulation and another sexual misconduct count, and sentenced to 16 years in prison. His attorneys appealed that conviction in June. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom dropped two indecent assault charges against Weinstein in September, because there was “no longer a realistic prospect of conviction,’’ the Associated Press reports.  

On Wednesday, the film mogul, who produced movies like “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare in Love”, was pushed into the courtroom in a wheelchair. He held in his hands a copy of Robert Harris’s “Conclave” (now a motion picture starring Ralph Fiennes, who also starred in one of Weinstein’s most celebrated films, “The English Patient”), as he listened to the proceedings. 

Weinstein appeared thin, weak and pale. He is currently incarcerated in New York’s notorious jail on Rikers Island at the slightly less miserable West Facility, which also houses the Communicable Disease Unit, for people with infectious diseases, but has been in and out of Bellevue Hospital in recent months. Numerous health issues have been reported. He was recently diagnosed with bone-marrow-cancer, he underwent emergency heart surgery in September, and his attorneys also say he suffers from macular degeneration and diabetes, and that his conditions have worsened due to the available food in jail. 

“I know everybody is very curious about Mr. Weinstein’s health. We’re not going to get into any specifics, except to say that Mr. Weinstein is a fighter, and he’s here to fight this case and he’s going fight with every ounce of strength in his body,” Mr. Aidala said in a press conference in front of the courthouse after the hearing.    

“We’re hopeful that the Department of Corrections and Health & Human Services, especially after the media attention that’s taken place in the last 48 hours, really gives him the treatment that any human being in the United States of America, and especially in the city of New York, deserves under the health challenges he’s suffering,” he added. 

The defense had argued against combining the indictments, because it “would expose Weinstein to undue prejudice by virtue of the very propensity evidence that necessitated a reversal of the first trial,” Weinstein’s attorneys  wrote in their Memorandum in Opposition. In other words, the jury would be exposed to evidence, like in the previous trial, stemming from allegations which had not yet been proven as fact.  

The court disagreed. In his decision, Judge Faber wrote that the case, the defense cited in their filings, was “distinguishable from the instant case” because the “trial court failed to provide an adequate limiting instruction to the jury” on how to view the evidence they were given. 

In essence, the judge argued that a key factor in presenting a jury with two separate indictments would be to give the jurors proper instructions, and that in Weinstein’s retrial, the prosecution would “proactively assist the Court in drafting a limiting instruction (to the jury) to minimize any prejudice resulting from consolidation.” 

The prosecution had, as the judge rephrased it, wanted to consolidate the two indictments to “reduce the burdens on the court system by limiting the number of juries that must be empaneled on this high profile case.” It would also be less costly for the court system.

The Court was ultimately “tasked”, the judge wrote, with weighing “the public interest in avoiding duplicative, lengthy and expensive trials against the defendant’s interest in being protected from unfair disadvantage.”

Judge Faber granted the motion, siding with the prosecution. He wrote that he expected prosecutors to call “more than a dozen witnesses to testify on matters related to both indictments,” concluding that “a joint trial will certainly ‘expedite the judicial process, reduce court congestion, and avoid the necessity of recalling witnesses.’” 

“It’s right out of their playbook from the last time,” Mr. Adaila told reporters after the hearing, referring to prosecutors. “They’re going to put his personality and his demeanor on trial as opposed to the facts of the case on trial.”

Mr. Aidala also pushed back on the allegations that Weinstein’s charges compared to the recent federal charges against the rapper, record producer and record executive, Sean John Combs, also known by his stage names Diddy, Puff Daddy and P. Diddy, who is accused of racketeering, sex trafficking by force, and transportation for purposes of prostitution and is now being held in the grim Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, despite desperate entreaties to a judge to be allowed to be under house arrest in his Florida mansion.

“There’s no allegations of force, like physical force.” Mr. Aidala said, referring to Weinstein’s charges as compared to those against Mr. Combs. “There’s no allegations of drugs and filming and baby oil and all that stuff,” he added (more than 1,000 containers of baby oil were found on Mr. Combs’ property). “This is all about people who knew each other, who went on dates, who fooled around. Everything was fine for years and years and years and now it’s not fine anymore.”

The Hollywood Reporter wrote in September, after the new charges were brought against Weinstein, that Jessica Mann, one of the women who brought claims against him in the 2020 trial, said in a statement,  “For those who continue to have the courage to come forward against Harvey, you are not alone. I will stand alongside you as we fight for a future where monsters like Harvey no longer hide in our closets, they sit alone behind bars.”

The judge said he would move the retrial into next year. Prosecutors suggested April 1 as a trial date, but the judge said he would not make a decision on the date until the next court hearing, which he tentatively scheduled for January 29.