Lawyer leaves Harvey Weinstein defense after 'orgasm cult' judge won't delay trial
Jennifer Bonjean was defending Harvey Weinstein in his sexual assault trial when the judge in Nicole Daedone's upcoming trial refused her request for an adjournment.
A former sexual wellness company executive had a big problem as she prepared for her criminal forced labor trial next month in New York: Her lead attorney was to be at another courthouse defending former Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in his sex crimes re-trial.
The judge in Weinstein’s case wouldn’t allow another attorney to substitute for Jennifer Bonjean after jury selection took longer than she expected, and the judge in the case against another of Bonjean’s clients, OneTaste founder Nicole Daedone, rejected her request to continue the trial for four weeks.
That left Daedone to begin trial next week without the lawyer who helped expose the inauthenticity of prosecution evidence provided by a former OneTaste employee. And it happened as questions persist about prosecutors’ use of company documents that a magistrate judge in a related civil case recently said are protected by attorney-client privilege.
Bonjean, however, decided to leave Weinstein’s trial so she can defend Daedone. She announced she was doing so on Thursday after the judge in Daedone’s case, U.S. District Judge Diane Gujarati, added to a pile of unfavorable rulings for the defense. Not only did she refuse to delay the trial, she stayed a magistrate’s order about privileged material as prosecutors appeal, and she rejected the defense’s request to look into whether prosecutors plan to use evidence in trial that was obtained by violating attorney-client privilege.
The losses, however, come amid a big win for the defense that appears to be reshaping the prosecution.
Prosecutors in March acknowledged that journals purportedly written by former employee Ayrias Blanck about her work at OneTaste were fabricated years later, and with input from a producer for a 2022 Netflix expose on the company. BBC titled a podcast about OneTaste in 2020 “The Orgasm Cult.”
Since then, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gillian Kassner, the lead prosecutor who repeatedly defended the journals’ authenticity, has left the case. The U.S. Department of Justice still appears committed to prosecuting Daedone and Cherwitz, however: Twenty prosecutors attended a hearing in Brooklyn on Tuesday about whether defense lawyers violated a protective order through a letter OneTaste’s civil attorney Ezra Landes recently sent the DOJ that accuses prosecutors and Blanck of committing crimes in relation to the journals.
A public relations specialist working with OneTaste called it “a show of intimidation, mimicking the defense’s own use of courtroom presence as support, but with the full institutional weight of the U.S. government behind it; tax dollars to have 20 prosecutors sitting in the gallery.”
“What began as a criminal case against a wellness company has now become a full-scale test of the limits of prosecutorial power, legal speech, and due process when government actors are themselves accused of misconduct,” Juda Englemayer wrote in an email.
Prosecutors say the case is about Daedone’s and Cherwitz’s “abusive tactics to coerce a group of OneTaste participants to provide labor, including sexual acts, for wealthy prospective clients, investors, and other OneTaste members.” They say Blanck’s journals aren’t central to the case , and they’ve accused defense lawyers of trying “to intimidate witnesses and prosecutors in advance of trial.”
Judge Gujarati still is deciding whether OneTaste’s lawyers violated two protective orders by citing case discovery when threatening lawsuits and communicating with prosecutors. Most recently, prosecutors said Ezra Landes, a partner at Spertus, Landes & Josephs, LLP in Los Angeles who represents OneTaste, quoted in a letter reports and other discovery that prosecutors say are protected under the orders.
Defense attorneys responded that the filing “implicitly” threatens criminal contempt charges, which they said “is a step too far.”
“The government is free to disagree with Defendants’ characterization of the investigation in this case; the adversarial system allows for that. However, the prosecutors should not be permitted to weaponize their office or their charging power to interfere with Defendants’ right to a zealous and vigorous defense,” according to a 15-page opposition from Bonjean as well as Cherwitz’s lawyers Celia Cohen and Michael Robotti of Ballard Spahr, LLP.
Bonjean said she and her co-counsel “had no knowledge or involvement” in the letter Landes sent, and they disagree that it’s threatening.
“The contents of the letter focus almost exclusively on Blanck and her fabricated journals. None of this material qualifies as Sensitive and never should have been so designated. The letter was not published to the media and apparently was sent only to an EDNY supervisor,” Bonjean wrote.
Gujarati held an evidentiary hearing on Tuesday that will continue Friday.
On Thursday, Landes’ lawyer Matthew Umhofer of Umhofer, Mitchell & King LLP in Los Angeles told the judge that Landes will not testify and should not be required to appear on Friday.
“Neither OneTaste nor the individual defendants have waived their privilege over common interest communications involving Mr. Landes. Beyond privilege, Mr. Landes is constrained by ethical duties, including the duty of confidentiality and the duty of loyalty,” Umhofer wrote.
Bonjean didn’t attend on Wednesday because she was in a state courtroom in Manhattan for Weinstein’s trial. Attorney Kelsey Hipp Killion appeared for Daedone instead.
Killion, a solo practitioner in Chicago, joined the case on April 15. A week later, Bonjean asked Judge Gujarati to delay the trial by four weeks because of Weinstein’s trial.
Bonjean said she thought Weinstein’s trial would end before Daedone’s trial was to begin, but “[t]rial did not commence as early as hoped and jury selection took longer than expected.”
“Undersigned counsel came to realize that a trial conflict was unavoidable. Although far from ideal, undersigned counsel was fully prepared to depart the Weinstein trial early if necessary and allow another attorney to substitute in,” Bonjean wrote in a four-page letter.
However, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Curtis Farber “indicated that he would not be amenable to counsel departing early, citing Mr. Weinstein’s Sixth Amendment rights observing that he might feel constrained to declare a mistrial if counsel were to depart early,” Bonjean continued.
Gujarati rejected the request the next day. She didn’t detail her reasoning beyond noting the request was “made on the eve of a trial that is estimated to last approximately six weeks.”
Hours later, the defense alerted Gujarati to a new ruling from U.S. Magistrate Judge Robert Levy that concluded OneTaste documents referred to by prosecutors were privileged internal documents that the DOJ shouldn’t have. Their three-page letter asked for a hearing under case law established through the 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case Kastigar v. United States, which “addressed when the burden shifts to the government in the context of a prosecution of an individual who previously gave immunized testimony.”
“This rule makes sense. When the government improperly accesses privileged information related to the case it charged, it is the government, not the defendant, that knows who accessed the information, when, and how they used it,” according to the letter.
Judge Gujarati, however, granted prosecutors’ request to stay Levy’s order and declined the defense’s request for a hearing. Prosecutors argued she should because Levy’s order “provided no rationale for his conclusion” beyond stating that the materials, “which are clearly marked as attorney-client privileged, are in fact privileged.” They also said the materials at issue “remain segregated from the prosecution team in Cherwitz and will not be used at trial.”
As of this week, prosecutors hadn’t narrowed their “vastly overbroad exhibit and witness lists despite defense counsel’s multiple requests,” defense lawyers told the judge in a letter.
“As previously noted, the defense case-in-chief is highly dependent on which witnesses the government calls and which exhibits it introduces at trial,” the attorneys wrote.
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