Ick! Harvey Weinstein Jurors Had To Look At Naked Photos Of Him!

We’re all for civic duty, but this is beyond the pale.

Members of the jury in the Harvey Weinstein trial were forced to look at naked photos of the disgraced movie mogul on Tuesday, adding injury to the insult that is their $40/day salary.

The cruel and unusual legal development is a result of the testimony of Jessica Mann, one of six women who are testifying against Weinstein as part of this trial.

Her controversial testimony revealed an extended relationship with the producing powerhouse, in which she admitted to exploiting the Hollywood connection — but also claims he raped her.

The story Mann told over multiple days of tear-filled testimony will be familiar to anyone who has followed the case. Here’s a brief recap of what she claimed.

[Trigger Warning for Sexual Assault content]

Just like dozens of other actresses, Mann met Weinstein in the context of helping her career. She said he was “extremely professional” at first.

However things allegedly changed after he invited her to dinner at the restaurant at the Peninsula Hotel. During the meal, it’s claimed a man approached the table to tell Weinstein he admired his films, which sent the producer into a “fury”; and he told the waiter to take the food to his room upstairs. It’s there he allegedly asked to give Mann a massage, and she declined — offering to give him one as a consolation, something she says she was repulsed by:

“He had a lot, a lot, of blackheads and the texture of that was uncomfortable.”

It was awkward, but Weinstein apparently invited her to several parties over the next month, and it was always professional. So when he told her and a friend to meet him at the Montage hotel bar to “talk to [them] about acting” she went. She remembers he said she was “prettier than Natalie Portman” (wtf!) and that she reminded him “a lot of his wife” (double wtf!). Then he invited them up to his room, telling them, “I am a harmless old man.”

Later, Mann says Weinstein got her alone in his bedroom and forcibly performed oral sex on her. She says she tried to fight him, but he wouldn’t let go — and when she said she didn’t want to he argued she had agreed to go the parties with him. She claims she tried to “fake an orgasm to get out of it.”

“I entered into what I thought was a real relationship with him and it was extremely degrading from that point on. He would talk very dirty to me about fantasies and things and compare me to other actresses he said were doing kinky, dirty stuff. He always wanted to film me.”

Eventually Mann says she tried to end that consensual relationship but stayed in contact with him out of fear for the future of her career. Then in March 2013 he showed up unexpectedly at her hotel in New York.

“I waited as long as I could before I felt like I had to go down there. So I go downstairs and when I get downstairs, Harvey is checking into the hotel, and then I really freaked out.”

She says Harvey got angry and warned her “not to embarrass” him, bringing her up to his room. There she says he ordered her to take off her clothes; she initially refused, but she says he was grabbing her so hard, she eventually “gave up” and got undressed.

“Once I was naked and laid on the bed, he went into the bathroom and sort of closed the door behind him. The door was still kind of open a little bit. And then he came out naked, and then he got on top of me and that’s when he put himself inside me.”

Afterward she went into the bathroom and saw what she believed to be a hypodermic needle full of medication Weinstein injected himself with to get an erection.

That brings us to the most shocking aspect of her testimony.

While the story of being sexually assaulted is horrifying, we’ve heard dozens of women’s Weinstein stories already — and this is absolutely in line with those.

But Mann also gave the jury something else — a very disturbing, outlandish description of Weinstein’s body. She said:

“The first time I saw him fully naked, I thought he was deformed and intersex.”

Whoa.

“He has extreme scarring that I didn’t know if he was a burn victim but it didn’t make sense. He does not have testicles and it appears that he has a vagina.”

Um… what??

So on Tuesday when the jury was shown photos of Weinstein’s naked body taken by the district attorney’s office it was to corroborate this wild description of “identifying characteristics.”

According to reports from inside the courtroom, one female juror who was handed the photos swallowed hard and looked disturbed. No kidding.

Thankfully for the rest of the world there weren’t cameras in the courtroom, but there was a courtroom sketch artist who captured the moment, which you can see just after the one minute mark in this video (below):

Actress Jessica Mann faced grilling over why she kept in contact with movie mogul Harvey Weinstein after he allegedly raped her in a Manhattan hotel https://t.co/wdp2ymD5rt pic.twitter.com/pjQ87tlqoR

— Reuters (@Reuters) February 5, 2020