Harvey Weinstein Trial: Defense Calls Model Who Accuser Claims 'Was Standing Right There' After Alleged Assault
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) – The sixth accuser who testified against Harvey Weinstein said after he groped her in a hotel bathroom in 2013, there was another woman there who did nothing to stop it.
Taking the witness stand at Weinstein's rape trial last week, Lauren Marie Young testified that a Mexican model named Claudia Salinas closed the door behind her and the former movie mogul as they went into the bathroom and "was standing right there" when Young managed to get out.
Young shot Salinas "an evil look, and I left as quick as I could without saying anything," Young told the jury.
Web Extra: Read the indictment against Weinstein (pdf)
Salinas, now 38 and working as a social media influencer, offered her own version Monday as the latest defense witness in the fourth week of a trial that could see closing arguments by the end of the week. She appeared in the 2009 Weinstein-produced film "Crossing Over" with Harrison Ford.
"Never happened," Salinas told jurors.
Testifying last week, model Lauren Marie Young said Salinas closed the door behind her and Weinstein as they went into the bathroom, where she said he stripped off his clothes, grabbed her breast and masturbated. Young said Salinas "was standing right there" when Weinstein was finished and she managed to get out.
"If I had done that, I would remember that," Salinas testified. "I would never close the door on anybody."
She said she met Weinstein in 2012 while an aspiring actress and never had a romantic relationship with him, adding that he had a "very strong personality" and "at times, he wasn't nice to me."
Weinstein's lawyers have said they also plan to call two friends of the woman he is charged with assaulting: a Hollywood talent agent and a Brazilian actress who lived with the woman in Los Angeles, who were on the March 2013 trip to New York City where she alleges Weinstein raped her at a midtown Manhattan hotel.
The defense witnesses follow more than two weeks of prosecution testimony, including the accounts of six women who say the once-powerful Hollywood boss subjected them to vile sexual behavior.
Weinstein's lawyers last week used a memory expert, cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, to try to cement doubts about the women's allegations after cross-examinations that sought to highlight inconsistencies in some of their accounts. In some cases, the encounters the women were recalling happened a decade or longer ago.
False memories "can be experienced with a great deal of detail, a great deal of emotion, even though they're false," she told the jury. "The emotion is not a guarantee you're dealing with an authentic memory."
Weinstein's lawyers haven't said whether he will testify.
If he does, he faces the prospect of prosecutors grilling him over the allegations and could give them an opening to bring in more witnesses in an attempt to rebut anything he says.
"That is a question that does not have an answer at this point," attorney Arthur Aidala said. "We want to see how our defense case goes."
Weinstein is charged with raping a woman in a Manhattan hotel room in March 2013 and forcibly performing oral sex on a different woman in 2006.
Weinstein, 67, has maintained any sexual encounters were consensual.
(© Copyright 2020 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
