Harvey Weinstein, through his lawyer Benjamin Brafman, filed paperwork in New York Supreme Court on Monday asking that it dismiss the five remaining counts in his sexual assault case.
Weinstein argues that the entire prosecution has been contaminated by police misconduct.
The request comes just a few weeks after Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. dismissed the accusations of Lucia Evans, who had accused Weinstein of forcing her to perform oral sex on him back in 2004. That was one of the six criminal charges Weinstein faced.
In the court documents filed on Monday, Brafman said the entire superseding indictment should be dismissed “because it was based on a defective Grand Jury proceeding, that was irreparably tainted by police misconduct, Lucia Evans’ false testimony and the District Attorney’s failure to provide the Grand Jury with exculpatory evidence of the long-term, consensual, intimate relationship between Mr. Weinstein and the alleged rape victim in counts three, four and five.”
The Manhattan D.A.’s office declined to comment on the filing.
In his filing, Weinstein references evidence he brought to the court in August when he argued for the dismissal of his New York rape case by citing an email in which he says his accuser declared her love for him and said she didn’t want to feel like a “booty call.”
The D.A.’s office said in response that it was not required to show those emails to the Grand Jury, as “the emails were not exculpatory as none of the ’emails contained the denial of the charged rape.’”
Weinstein was initially indicted on six charges, including predatory sexual assault, criminal sexual act in the first degree, rape in the first degree and rape in the third degree. He has pleaded not guilty to all of the charges. He is also being investigated by police in Los Angeles and London.
Last week, in an amended complaint to another ongoing lawsuit, Weinstein was accused of sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl, who was also a virgin at the time, at a 2002 event in New York City.
The complaint, filed last Wednesday and obtained by TheWrap, said Weinstein “lured” a woman identified as Jane Doe “to his apartment and sexually assaulted her.” The complaint said that Weinstein “continued to emotionally abuse and sexually harass her for nearly a decade thereafter.”
Pamela Chelin contributed to this reporting.