NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) – Harvey Weinstein used his final minutes before he was sentenced to portray himself as a martyr in a disjointed rant that led one of his lawyers to try to stop him while an accuser shook her head in disbelief.
"We are going through this crisis right now in our country," Weinstein said on Wednesday (March 11), addressing the judge just before he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
"I was the first example, and now there are many men who have been accused of abuse, something I think none of us understood."
If Weinstein's decision to speak was a surprising twist, what he actually said bordered on the bizarre.
He spoke after one of his victims, Jessica Mann, called him "the power over the powerless".
But Weinstein tried to cast himself as the powerless one, comparing himself and other men brought down by the #MeToo movement to victims of McCarthyism.
He likened himself to one of the best-known screenwriters blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
"Everybody is on some kind of blacklist," he said.
"I think possibly men like myself, like Dalton Trumbo – they said they were Communists, and now there's a scare, just like that now."
Much of what Weinstein said echoed comments he made in a December 2019 New York Post interview and in two letters he sent to industry colleagues in late 2017, as the allegations against him were first becoming public.
He admitted behaving badly but again denied having non-consensual sex with anyone. He also touted his support for women and women's stories in the film industry, as well as other good causes.
His rambling delivery and the presence of his accusers in the hushed courtroom lent his 10-minute speech a surreal air.
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