Andy Byford Resigns as New York City’s Subway Chief

He arrived two years ago to turn around the city’s failing subway, making significant progress.

NY TIMES

After being lured to New York two years ago to help revive the city’s subway, Andy Byford earned praise from riders and mass transit advocates for bringing about improvements on an antiquated system that had been undermined by breakdowns, delays and mismanagement.

But as Mr. Byford rose in stature, even earning the nickname “Train Daddy” among rail enthusiasts, he increasingly clashed with the one official who has the final say over the subways: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who considers himself something of a modern-day master builder.

On Thursday, Mr. Byford resigned, sowing doubt about the future of extensive plans that are intended to modernize the nation’s largest subway system. Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, responded with one word on Twitter: “DEVASTATED.”

Mr. Byford suggested in his resignation letter that he had chafed over a plan supported by the governor to scale back his duties as part of a reorganization for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that runs the subways and is controlled by Mr. Cuomo.

Mr. Byford’s new role would “focus solely on day-to-day-running of service,” instead of more ambitious projects, Mr. Byford wrote. There were other leaders, he said, who could “perform this important, but reduced, service delivery role.”

Interviews with transit officials and lawmakers and others indicate that Mr. Byford’s departure capped months of escalating tension between the two men: a hard-charging governor from Queens who frequently mocks the transit bureaucracy versus a self-described subway nerd from Britain who has spent his career reviving and running transit systems around the world.

Mr. Byford’s colleagues at the M.T.A. believed Mr. Byford’s high profile may have irked Mr. Cuomo. The governor’s aides said that Mr. Byford often tried to take credit for improvements that were unrelated to his own work.

Mr. Cuomo dismissed claims that disagreements led Mr. Byford to resign, indicating that plans to reorganize the transit agency — and take some responsibilities away from Mr. Byford — might have contributed to his decision.

“He did the job for two years,” Mr. Cuomo told reporters. “Nobody does these jobs for a lifetime.”

Over the last year, the two men quarreled over plans to fix the L train, a major line between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and new technology to upgrade signals.

When Mr. Byford publicly questioned Mr. Cuomo’s decision to call off the shutdown of the L train tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn, Mr. Byford suddenly found himself sidelined. The two men did not speak for four months in 2019.

Mr. Byford had considered quitting since last spring as he struggled to get along with Mr. Cuomo, who controls the flow of money to the system.

Mr. Cuomo was angry after Mr. Byford tried to resign in October, according to officials familiar with the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel issues. His bosses at the transit agency convinced Mr. Byford to stay, but the détente did not last long.

At that point, the governor signaled to state officials that the rocky relationship had reached its end point and that he expected Mr. Byford to be gone by the first quarter of 2020, the officials said.

By December, Mr. Byford made up his mind that he would leave after completing his second year, those officials said. Another likely departure, the officials say, is Pete Tomlin, who was brought in by Mr. Byford to run a multibillion dollar overhaul of the signal system, which is considered the linchpin of efforts to transform the subway.

Mr. Cuomo said the subway system was making significant progress and would continue to do so under a new leader.

Mr. Byford had been hired after the governor had declared the subway to be in a state of emergency. His sweeping plans and dogged work ethic made New Yorkers rally around him. Mr. Byford’s arrival in January 2018 was celebrated as a turning point for the subway, and profiles in The New Yorker and on 60 Minutes followed.

When Mr. Byford took over running the subway, only 58 percent of trains were on time. There were near constant meltdowns and several train derailments raised safety concerns.

Mr. Byford helped push the on-time rate over 80 percent through a series of operational changes and a focus on the basics, including repairing faulty switches and increasing train speeds. He said he wanted to bring the on-time rate into the 90s and proposed a major overhaul of the subway’s ancient signal equipment.

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Mr. Byford helped push the on-time rate for the subway to over 80 percent. Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Democrats cap impeachment arguments with focus on Trump stonewalling.

Mr. Schiff told senators they must convict and remove President Trump because "you know you can't trust this president to do what's right for this country."Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times

THE HILL

House Democrats launched their final round of arguments in President Trump’s impeachment trial on Friday, shifting their focus to the president’s blanket stonewalling of Congress’s inquiry into his Ukrainian affairs as another basis for his removal from office.

Democrats say Trump trampled on Congress’s legal authority to act as a check on presidential power when he adopted an across-the-board refusal to cooperate with House investigators examining his dealings with Ukraine last year.

While their case has centered on allegations that Trump abused his power, the third and final day of the Democrats’ opening arguments will focus on the second impeachment article passed by the House last month: obstruction of Congress.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the lead manager of the House team, also signaled that Democrats intend to put up a fight Friday for witnesses, pushing back on the White House legal team’s claims of executive privilege.

“This is not a trial over a speeding ticket or shoplifting. This is an impeachment trial involving the president of the United States,” Schiff told reporters in remarks ahead of Friday’s arguments. 

“Unlike in the House where the president could play rope-a-dope in the courts for years, that is not an option for the president's team here,” he continued. “And it gives no refuge to people who want to hide behind executive privilege to avoid the truth coming out.”

The Democrats’ impeachment case hinges on allegations that Trump withheld military aid to Ukraine, not to advance U.S. interests, but as leverage to pressure the country’s leaders to find dirt on his political opponents.

“No one anticipated that a president would stoop to this misconduct, and Congress has passed no specific law to make this behavior a crime,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said Thursday. “Yet this is precisely the kind of abuse that the Framers had in mind when they wrote the impeachment clause.”

“The Do Nothing Democrats just keep repeating and repeating, over and over again, the same old ‘stuff’ on the Impeachment Hoax,” Trump tweeted Friday morning.

“The Framers, the courts, and past Presidents have recognized that honoring Congress’s right to information in an impeachment investigation is a critical safeguard in our system of divided powers,” the Democratic impeachment managers wrote in the 46-page brief outlining their legal arguments heading into the Senate trial. 

The administration’s defiance came in two forms. First, the White House directed administration officials not to testify in the investigation, even if subpoenaed. And second, the administration refused to turn over any documents related to Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine. 

Democrats have described the administration’s lack of cooperation as nothing less than an attempt to cover up for the president’s conduct.

But Democrats warned that Trump is setting a dangerous precedent, stealing congressional powers that would act as a check on future presidents. 

“In terms of the obstruction, the precedent would be equally devastating to the government because it would mean that the impeachment power is essentially a nullity. It is unenforceable. The president can delay it into nonexistence and this goes not just to impeachment investigations,” Schiff said.

“If the Senate goes along with the president's obstruction, it will in every way impede the House and impede the Senate in its own responsibilities."

 He asked the senators to consider something else Trump could threaten: themselves.

“I don’t care how close you are to this president,” Schiff said. “Do you think for a moment that he wouldn’t investigate you if it was in his political interests?”

In the Capitol, Mr. Schiff is ordinarily serious, composed and in control. But as he moved toward his closing comments, he grew visibly emotional as he recalled the testimony of Lt. Col. Alexander S. Vindman, the White House national security aide and Ukrainian immigrant who testified in impeachment hearings before Congress and helped Democrats build their case.

Colonel Vindman, who fled the former Soviet Union with his family when he was 3, testified that he felt deeply uncomfortable with a telephone call Mr. Trump had on July 25 with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, when Mr. Trump asked the Ukrainian leader to “do us a favor” and investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Mr. Schiff recalled how Colonel Vindman told lawmakers that unlike in the former Soviet Union, “right matters” in the United States.

“Well, let me tell you something,” Mr. Schiff went on, his forefinger jabbing the air for emphasis. “If right doesn’t matter, if right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the Constitution is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the framers were. Doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is.” If “right doesn’t matter,” he concluded, “we’re lost.”

Annabella Sciorra testifies that Harvey Weinstein raped her: ‘It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake’

WASHINGTON POST

Actress Annabella Sciorra gave emotional testimony Thursday that Harvey Weinstein raped her more than 25 years ago as she helplessly tried to ward off his aggressive advances.

“I was punching him. I was kicking him. I was just trying to get him away from me, and he took my hands and put them over my head,” Sciorra told the jury in Weinstein’s sexual assault trial, her eyes welling up with tears and her voice breaking.

“He put my hands over my head like this,” she said, stretching her hands in the air to demonstrate for this jury.

Weinstein, who had been watching her from the defense table, turned his gaze away from his accuser as she detailed the encounter.

“He got on top of me and he raped me,” Sciorra said. During the alleged assault, she said, Weinstein performed oral sex on her, announcing that “This is for you.”

Harvey Weinstein faces five sex-crime charges stemming from sexual misconduct allegations that sparked the worldwide #MeToo movement in 2017. (Darian Woehr, Sarah Hashemi/The Washington Post)

Sciorra, 59, is the prosecution’s bold-name witness; she has appeared in numerous movies stretching back to the early 1990s (“The Hand That Rocks the Cradle”) and TV shows including “The Sopranos,” for which she earned an Emmy nomination.

In her five hours of testimony, she described freezing after the attack, adding that “It was just so disgusting that my body started to shake.”

She said she had no romantic interest in Weinstein. The film producer arrived at her Manhattan apartment uninvited one night in late 1993 or early 1994 after a group dinner they both attended nearby.

Weinstein had dropped her off at her building and left, and she went upstairs to get ready for bed, dressing in a white nightgown that was a family heirloom from Italy.

Weinstein managed to get to the 17th-floor apartment without a call-up from her doorman, and he forced his way inside, Sciorra told jurors.

Sciorra said she told her close friend, “White Men Can’t Jump” star Rosie Perez, about the rape around the time it happened. Perez may later testify to the details of the conversation.

Sciorra arrived in the courtroom with prosecutors shortly after 9 a.m., wearing a navy dress. She avoided looking at Weinstein’s defense table as she walked to the witness stand but rose from the stand to point at him when she was asked by prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon to identify her attacker.

In 1997, Sciorra agreed to take a part in “Copland,” a film produced by Miramax, Weinstein’s company. When she and fellow cast members, including Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro, were at Cannes Film Festival promoting the movie, Weinstein knocked on her hotel room door at 5 a.m. and pushed his way in, Sciorra testified. She had opened the door, believing it may have been a wake-up call for a work obligation.

“When I opened the door, the defendant was in his underwear with a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a videotape in the other,” she said.

Sciorra said she panicked and started dialing the front desk. Hotel staff arrived and Weinstein left.

And at one point over the years, Sciorra said, she confronted Weinstein, but his response only instilled further fear. She “tried to talk to him about what happened” and told him “how I woke up and that I blacked out, fainted.”

He responded that “That’s what all the nice Catholic girls say,” the actress said.

But his eyes “went black” and turned “very menacing,” she said. “He leaned into me and said, ‘this remains between you and I.’ ”

Sciorra said on direct examination that she met Weinstein around 1990 or 1991 at a party in Los Angeles that her agent took her to. “I don’t remember anything remarkable about the conversation [at the party], only that he gave me his card and said that if I came across any scripts he was looking for some good scripts.”

She said she accepted a ride from Weinstein to the place she was staying in Malibu, but the interaction was professional.

Weinstein also is charged with raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann in 2013 and with forcing a sex act on former production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006.

Sciorra’s allegations are included in the predatory sexual assault counts he faces — the top charges — for allegedly committing a pattern of sex offenses. If convicted on predatory sexual assault, he faces 10 years to life in prison.

On cross-examination, defense lawyer Donna Rotunno confronted the witness about why she didn’t complain to management at the Gramercy Park building or ask her doorman to explain how Weinstein got up to her apartment unannounced around 1 a.m. The lawyer suggested that Sciorra also told a onetime Miramax employee that she had “awkward sex” with Weinstein — but Sciorra flatly denied ever saying that.

Rotunno played a scene from a lighthearted Sciorra interview on the “Late Show With David Letterman” on Aug. 6, 1997, during which she admits to spewing elaborate lies in professional interviews to cover up details of her private life.

“I have a bad reputation, and I was caught recently in the last couple of years lying about quite a few things,” she told Letterman with a wide grin. “There was one that I made up about Dennis Hopper and my father raising iguanas for the circus, or something like that.”

Letterman asked her how he could know she wasn’t lying in his interview that day.

“You don’t!” Sciorra said.

“Nothing further,” Rotunno said.

Weinstein’s defense started trying to poke holes in the case in opening statements Wednesday, pointing to Mann’s long history with Weinstein.

She swapped warm and “loving” emails with him for four years after she now says she was violently assaulted. In that time, they carried on a sexual relationship and referred to him as her “casual boyfriend.”

At one point, she broke up with a boyfriend while still involved with Weinstein, his lawyer Damon Cheronis told the jury.

Mann also sent repeated emails trying to set up dates with him in the years after the alleged attack at a Doubletree Hotel in Manhattan.

In 2009, three years after her alleged unwanted encounter with Weinstein, Haleyi emailed him asking him to set her up with a gig in London because she was “saving up to become a kundalini yoga teacher” and needed cash.

None of the accusers who will testify reported the alleged events to law enforcement before the dawn of the #MeToo movement in October 2017.

NY TIMES

They met at a party in Los Angeles in the early 1990s. She was an up-and-coming actress. He was a young producer. As they got to know each other over the next few years, there were, she said, some “inappropriate” gestures: a care package of popcorn and Valium, a box of chocolate penises.

Then, Annabella Sciorra said on the witness stand on Thursday, Harvey Weinstein raped her.

Fighting back tears, Ms. Sciorra testified in excruciating detail to a hushed courtroom about the night she said she was attacked. After shoving his way into her Manhattan apartment, she said, Mr. Weinstein took her to a bedroom, forced her onto the bed and, as she sought to fight him off, sexually assaulted her.

“I was trying to get him off me,” Ms. Sciorra told the jury, her voice cracking with emotion. “I was punching him, kicking him.” But Mr. Weinstein held her down, she said, adding: “He got on top of me and he raped me.”

The testimony in State Supreme Court in Manhattan marked the first time that one of Mr. Weinstein’s numerous accusers took the stand at a long-awaited criminal trial that has come to symbolize the #MeToo movement.

Several women are expected to testify during the trial that Mr. Weinstein attacked them, though Mr. Weinstein faces charges of rape and criminal sexual act based on the allegations of only two of them. The judge is allowing the others to testify to establish a pattern of behavior, even though most of their allegations are too old to qualify as crimes under state law.

Ms. Sciorra’s encounter with Mr. Weinstein also happened too long ago to be charged as a rape, but prosecutors are using her testimony to bolster a charge of predatory sexual assault. That count carries a possible life sentence and requires the state to prove Mr. Weinstein committed a serious sexual offense against at least two people.

Mr. Weinstein, now 67, faces charges that he raped an aspiring actress in a Manhattan hotel room in 2013 and forced oral sex on a production assistant in his TriBeCa apartment in 2006.

Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers maintain that the women willingly had sex with him to advance their careers, and that some of them continued intimate relationships with him after the alleged attacks.

Ms. Sciorra, who is best known for her role in “The Sopranos,” said the assault took place in her apartment in Gramercy Park in either late 1993 or early 1994.

That night, she said, she had joined Mr. Weinstein at an uneventful dinner with several other people at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan. Mr. Weinstein gave her a ride home, she said, and after he dropped her off at 10 p.m., she went upstairs, got into a nightgown and brushed her teeth, preparing herself for bed.

Moments later, she recalled, there was a knock at her door and she thought it was a neighbor or her doorman. But when she opened the door, she said, Mr. Weinstein pushed his way inside.

When Mr. Weinstein unbuttoned his shirt, she said, she realized “he thought we were about to have sex.” She said that she considered running into her bathroom, but before she could, Mr. Weinstein grabbed the front of her nightgown, pushed her into a bedroom, and raped her on the bed, pinning her arms above her head.

“I said, ‘No, no,’ but there was not much I could do,” she said. “My body shut down. It was so disgusting my body started to shake in a way that was unusual. It was like a seizure or something.”

Mr. Weinstein walked out, she said, and she lost consciousness. “I woke up, but I’m not sure if I fainted, blacked out or fell asleep,” she said. She was on the floor with her nightgown pushed up, she said.

Several weeks later, she said, she confronted Mr. Weinstein at a restaurant about the incident. “This remains between you and I,” she recalled Mr. Weinstein telling her.

“It was very menacing,” she said. “His eyes went black — I thought he was going to hit me right there.”

Ms. Sciorra said that she never called the police. “He was someone I knew,” Ms. Sciorra said. “I felt at the time that rape was something that happened in a back alleyway in a dark place.”

Ms. Sciorra said the attack left emotional scars. She started to drink heavily and even began cutting herself. Sometimes, she recalled, she would slice her hands and fingers and paint a white wall in her apartment “blood red.”

In the years after the assault, Ms. Sciorra said, Mr. Weinstein continued to harass her. On one occasion, she recalled, he showed up unannounced at her hotel room in London, so she changed rooms in the middle of the night.

In 1997, Ms. Sciorra told the jury, she went to the Cannes Film Festival to promote her movie “Cop Land.” One morning, at 5 a.m., she said, she opened the door of her hotel room to find Mr. Weinstein standing in the hallway in his underwear. He had a bottle of baby oil in one hand and a videotape in the other.

“I couldn’t get past him,” Ms. Sciorra said. She said she “pressed all of the call buttons” on the telephone. “People came,” she added, “and he left.”

She said she remained mostly silent about the incidents until October 2017, when she spoke to a journalist — likely a reference to Ronan Farrow, who published an account of the alleged rape in Manhattan in The New Yorker.

“I was afraid for my life,” Ms. Sciorra said.

Donna Rotunno, one of Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, attempted to discredit Ms. Sciorra’s testimony on cross-examination, pointing out that the actress could not remember the exact date of the alleged assault and several other details about the night.

Ms. Rotunno also asked Ms. Sciorra why she would open her apartment door without first finding out who might be on the other side.

“So, you hear this knock, you’re in a nightgown and you don’t say, ‘Who is it?’” Ms. Rotunno asked.

“No,” Ms. Sciorra answered. “I opened the door and he was right there.”

Ms. Rotunno asked Ms. Sciorra why she did not flee. “He was too big,” the witness answered. The defense lawyer asked why she never called the doorman to inquire why he had let Mr. Weinstein in without her permission. “I was devastated,” Ms. Sciorra said.

Ms. Sciorra acknowledged to Ms. Rotunno that after the alleged assault, she did not see a doctor, or call the police. She said she told only two friends what had happened, one of them the actress Rosie Perez.

“At the time,” Ms. Sciorra said, “I didn’t understand that was rape.”

“You were 33 years old, if your timeline is correct,” Ms. Rotunno said.

Ms. Rotunno later played the jury a video clip of Ms. Sciorra appearing on “Late Show With David Letterman” in 1997. In the clip, Ms. Sciorra admitted that she had made up little lies about her life, saying, for instance, that her father had once raised iguanas in the circus.

In a rebuttal minutes later, the lead prosecutor, Joan Illuzzi asked Ms. Sciorra if she had ever lied about matters as serious as her allegations against Mr. Weinstein. “No,” she replied.

“This is not a tale?” Ms. Illuzzi said.

“No,” Ms. Sciorra said.

Rosie Perez, at Weinstein Trial, Backs Up Rape Allegation

NY TIMES

One night, at the end of 1993, Rosie Perez called her old friend, Annabella Sciorra, looking to go out and have some fun. Ms. Sciorra, a fellow Brooklyn actress, answered the phone in a strange whisper. Ms. Perez asked her what was wrong.

“She said, ‘I think I was raped,’” Ms. Perez testified on Friday at Harvey Weinstein’s trial. Ms. Perez asked the inevitable question: “Do you know who did it?”

At the time, Ms. Sciorra could not, or would not, name her attacker. Instead, she broke into tears and said, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and she hung up the phone, Ms. Perez said.

But in another call a few months later, Ms. Perez added, Ms. Sciorra finally identified the man she claimed had assaulted her: It was Mr. Weinstein.

“She swore me never to tell anybody,” Ms. Perez said. “I told her to go to the police, and she said: ‘I can’t. He will destroy me. He will destroy my career.’”

Ms. Perez appeared in court on Friday as a prosecution witness, called to the stand at the trial, in Manhattan, to bolster Ms. Sciorra’s own testimony that Mr. Weinstein assaulted her.

On Thursday, a tearful Ms. Sciorra, known for her work in “The Sopranos,” told the jury that Mr. Weinstein pushed his way into her Gramercy Park apartment and raped her after giving her a ride home from a dinner party.

Mr. Weinstein’s trial is widely seen as a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement and has delved into complicated issues of consent and power dynamics in professional situations. Ms. Perez’s account touched upon another common theme of sexual assaults: how women often delay reporting attacks and live with them in silence.

On cross-examination, Damon Cheronis, one of Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, cut straight to that point. Under his questioning, Ms. Perez acknowledged that, even though one of her best friends had just said she was raped, they did not speak for a couple of days.

“I tried to — she didn’t want to talk about it,” Ms. Perez told the jury. “She was still very upset.”

As months went by, Ms. Perez said, Ms. Sciorra would mention the alleged assault at times, but did not want to share details.

“It was very, very traumatic for her,” Ms. Perez said, “and it was traumatic for me.”

Then in 1994, when Ms. Sciorra was in London filming “The Innocent Sleep,” the two friends spoke by phone. Ms. Sciorra told Ms. Perez that Mr. Weinstein was “harassing her” — he had banged on the door of her hotel room — and that she was “scared he was going to get her again,” Ms. Perez said.

It was during that call, Ms. Perez told the jury, that she “put two and two together” and guessed it was Mr. Weinstein who Ms. Sciorra said had attacked her months earlier. “She started screaming,” Ms. Perez said. “And I tried to calm her down.”

Six women are expected to testify against Mr. Weinstein at the trial. He is accused of five felony counts, including rape and predatory sexual assault, and could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of the last charge.

His lawyers argue that the women who have accused him had sex with him willingly to advance their careers. Prosecutors claim he lured his accusers to meetings with promises of work, and then physically overpowered them.

The accusations against the producer came to a head in October 2017, when revelations about his alleged serial abuses were published in The New York Times and The New Yorker. More than 90 women have since come forward to accuse Mr. Weinstein of sexual misconduct.

As allegations about his mistreatment of women began to grow and circulate, the producer became increasingly concerned about “the nature of articles” that were set to be published about him, said Sam Anson, a private investigator who testified on Friday before Ms. Perez took the stand.

Two months before the articles in The Times and The New Yorker appeared, Mr. Anson said that he received an email from Mr. Weinstein asking him to investigate a list of “red flags,” people who Mr. Weinstein thought were speaking about him to the media. Among the targets was Ms. Sciorra.

“He was concerned that people on the list might be providing information to journalists,” Mr. Anson said, adding that Mr. Weinstein was also worried “that articles were being written about him that discussed his sexual life in a negative way.”

Mr. Anson never undertook an investigation.

Mr. Weinstein was once a Hollywood giant, a feared executive who reshaped the independent movie industry with Oscar winners like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction,” and who was a big donor to former President Bill Clinton and other Democrats.

The indictment charges Mr. Weinstein with sexually assaulting two women: Mimi Haleyi, who was a production assistant on his show “Project Runway,” and a hairstylist and aspiring actress from Washington State, whom The Times is not naming because she is an alleged rape victim.

Mr. Weinstein is accused of forcing oral sex on Ms. Haleyi in his TriBeCa apartment in 2006 and raping the aspiring actress at a Doubletree Hotel in Midtown Manhattan in 2013.

Ms. Sciorra was called by prosecutors to bolster the charge of predatory sexual assault. The five-year time limit for filing a separate rape charge in the attack she described has long passed.

Justice James A. Burke is permitting three other women to testify about their allegations that Mr. Weinstein attacked them, even though he is not charged with crimes in those cases.

Prosecutors hope to use their testimony to establish that Mr. Weinstein has a longstanding pattern of preying on women. A similar trial tactic helped lead to a conviction of Bill Cosby on a sexual assault charge in Pennsylvania.

Earlier on Friday, Dr. Barbara Ziv, a forensic psychiatrist who provided expert testimony in Mr. Cosby’s second trial, explained to jurors in the Weinstein case why a woman might remain in contact with her attacker after an assault.

During opening statements, a defense lawyer told the jury that Ms. Haleyi and the aspiring actress from Washington State had stayed in touch with Mr. Weinstein for years after the alleged assaults. They have pointed to friendly emails the women exchanged with Mr. Weinstein as evidence that the sexual encounters were consensual.

But Dr. Ziv said it is common for sexual assault victims to stay in contact with their attackers if they know or work with them. One reason, she said, is a strong desire to move past the incident. Some victims also want to avoid hurting their jobs or reputations.

Sometimes, she added, the attacker will threaten the victim into silence.

“There’s always a worry on the part of the victim that a perpetrator can invade other aspects of their life and ruin their life,” she said.