Attorney for Bill Cosby, R. Kelly wants to join Harvey Weinstein defense

Prominent lawyer Jennifer Bonjean, who has represented high-profile clients such as Bill Cosby and R. Kelly, has filed a motion to join the defense team of longtime film producer Harvey Weinstein.

Weinstein is currently being sued by a former model/actress, referred to as Jane Doe No. 1 in court documents, who alleges that Weinstein sexually assaulted her in her Beverly Hills hotel room in 2013. The lawsuit filed in February 2023 alleges sexual battery, false imprisonment, negligence and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

Bonjean has filed court papers asking Judge Elaine Mandel to allow her to serve on the case as an out-of-state attorney who is not a member of the California State Bar. Ashley Cohen, another lawyer in Bonjean’s firm, has also applied to represent Weinstein. Weinstein’s current lawyer in the case, Michael Freedman, is licensed in California.

In an answer to the plaintiff’s complaint filed on Monday, Bonjean and Freedman stated that her claims are barred by the statute of limitations, that her request for punitive damages is unconstitutional and that her lawsuit should be dismissed. Bonjean’s motion is scheduled for hearing on June 9, 2023.

Weinstein was convicted on Dec. 19, 2022, of three of the seven counts he was facing related to Jane Doe No. 1 — forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Feb. 23, 2023.

In Weinstein’s criminal case trial, his attorney Mark Werksman argued 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, and her suit alleges that Weinstein came to her room unexpectedly after she attended events related to the festival that day. “After he was done raping her, he acted as if nothing out of the ordinary happened and left,” her court papers stated.

Doe did not report the incident until 2017, when she had a talk with her daughter during a time when Weinstein was at the forefront of the #metoo movement, according to her court papers. The lawsuit is one of several that Weinstein faces in California, including one from actress Ashley Judd.

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