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Lawyers for woman suing Harvey Weinstein get special order to serve suit
The Industry Mar 07, 2023
Harvey Weinstein. | Photo by Thomas Hawk (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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Attorneys representing a former model/actress whom Harvey Weinstein sexually assaulted in her Beverly Hills hotel room in 2013 have obtained a judge’s help in getting the woman’s lawsuit served on the incarcerated, disgraced producer, who had allegedly refused to come out of his cell to accept the court papers.
The plaintiff is identified as Jane Doe No. 1 in the Santa Monica Superior Court lawsuit filed Feb. 9 that alleges sexual battery, false imprisonment, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress. She seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.
On Monday, Judge Elaine W. Mandel granted a request by attorneys for the woman for a court order allowing a sheriff’s deputy to accompany a process server to present the court papers to Weinstein at the Twin Towers jail. The hearing was originally scheduled for Tuesday, but the judge decided to hear the matter a day early.
Deputies at Twin Towers told the law firm’s process server they would be able to take the papers to Weinstein only if there was a court order, according to Doe’s attorneys’ court papers, who additionally said that Weinstein had refused to come out of his cell to be presented with the suit.
The judge in Weinstein’s recently concluded criminal case has a regular order prohibiting defendants from being served with civil suit papers in the courtroom, according to Doe’s lawyers’ court papers. In addition, approaching a criminal defendant in the courtroom to serve them with papers without prior permission from the judge is a possible violation of the law, and Weinstein’s criminal defense lawyers stated in open court that they were not authorized to accept service of any civil lawsuits or documents on their client’s behalf, according to Doe’s attorneys’ court papers.
Weinstein, 70, was convicted Dec. 19 of three of the seven counts he was facing — forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object. All three of those counts related to Doe, with the crimes occurring on or about Feb. 18, 2013. Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison Feb. 23.
Weinstein’s criminal case attorney, Mark Werksman, told jurors in the criminal case trial that Jane Doe No. 1 “was not a woman who was alone and vulnerable and cut off from the world,” noting that she let his client into her hotel room at Mr. C Beverly Hills and had a cell phone and the hotel room phone at her disposal.
The plaintiff was in town to attend a film festival. Her suit states that Weinstein came to her room unexpectedly after she attended events that day related to the festival.
“After he was done raping her, he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary happened and left,” the plaintiff’s court papers allege.
Doe did not report the incident until 2017, when she had a talk with her daughter and at the same time Weinstein was put at the forefront of the #metoo movement, according to her court papers.
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