Since early January, Harvey Weinstein has arrived every morning in an SUV at the 17-story modernist courthouse in Lower Manhattan where his sexual assault trial took place. On his way in from his home in Connecticut, the film producer would pick up some of his defense lawyers. Arriving at court, they would usher him past perhaps a dozen cameras lining the sidewalk from the curb to the courthouse’s front door. He would wheel through a security check on his walker, where guards would wave him down with a wand. Arriving on the 15th floor, he would march past a wall of journalists, including a predominantly female set of courthouse reporters who would call out questions as they filmed him with their phones. A scrum of armed court officers would escort him into the courtroom. The officers would ease him into his seat at the defense table, and then out again every time court recessed or he needed a break.

I wouldn’t say Weinstein necessarily grew comfortable with the routine. But the time he spent performing it was the equivalent of a monthlong, full-time job, and eventually a pattern of behavior set in. He sometimes cracked jokes in response to the press line’s inquiries. He appeared to become familiar with the guards. By Monday, the fifth day of jury deliberations, he was eating Mentos like popcorn while reading what appeared to be a script. He wrote notes in the margin with a pen.

When the jury rang its buzzer around 11:30 a.m., the defense team seemed to remain calm. Lawyer Arthur Aidala chatted with his white-haired and extravagantly mustachioed father, Louis Aidala, who had been reading the newspaper in the courtroom’s gallery. (The elder Aidala, also a criminal defense attorney, defended World Trade Center bomber Eyad Ismail.) Judge James Burke returned and donned his robe, shaking the sleeves into place, then searched his pockets for his phone. He read aloud the jury’s latest note: “We the jury have reached a verdict.”

There was a flurry of activity. Journalists rushed in and out of the room wordlessly with their laptops aloft. (Computer use is allowed for courtroom journalists, but transmitting messages is not. To tweet, file stories, and send panicked notes to editors, one must go into the hall.) Burke reviewed various issues raised by Weinstein’s defense. When the jury entered—for the first time that day—the foreman was wearing a black button-up shirt with a pink bow tie, a step up from his usual wardrobe of pullovers and scarves. (The courtroom gets cold. On the second day of deliberations, when court officers were reluctant to shut the windows, I was typing with my mittens on when defense attorney Donna Rotunno, hugging herself to stay warm in a reportedly $3,000 leather blazer from Balmain, asked the judge to shut the window. He declined.) The jurors were solemn when the foreman delivered their verdict: guilty of a first-degree criminal sexual act and a third-degree rape, charges that could put him in jail for nearly 30 years when he is sentenced in March.

Weinstein stared ahead and seemed not to respond when court officers approached him, after the verdict, to handcuff and remove him from court. Throughout the trial, sirens from a nearby firehouse have been audible and, at times, have interrupted testimony. Rotunno and Assistant District Attorney Joan Illuzzi were clashing over whether to send Weinstein to jail—or allow him to remain out on bail—when another round of alarms went off. Aidala later told NPR that Weinstein had struggled to accept his fate: “He looked at me and he said, ‘I’m innocent. But I’m innocent. How could this happen in America?’” At some point, Aidala told reporters, he realized, “I’ve known him for a year and I don’t think I’ve asked him what his favorite movie is, so I asked him what his favorite movie is.” Weinstein’s answer was The Godfather.

Power has long been the central theme of Weinstein’s fame. He brokered it. He made plays for it. He seemed to build a world where his power could never be destroyed, just transferred from one form to another. Financial power became social power when he purchased silence with settlements. Professional power became sexual power when he reportedly cajoled job-seekers for carnal favors—and then, as Miriam Haley testified, used his physical power to commit the criminal sex act for which he now faces up to 25 years in prison. (Weinstein has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.)

Even as he approaches prison, Weinstein is not entirely powerless. His lawyers said on Monday that they plan to appeal his conviction, and during the trial laid the groundwork on a number of issues. But his next legal moves will take place behind bars—and that may include preparing for another sexual assault trial in Los Angeles. Weinstein’s lawyers claim the deck was stacked against him in New York. But here he was free to roam his lawyers’ offices, hang out at Cipriani, watch football with his friends, and correspond by email any time he pleased—which will not be the case if he prepares for the next trial from prison. Power has a way of amplifying itself: Power begets more power. But the loss of power can be felt exponentially too.

“Harvey is very strong. Harvey is unbelievably strong. He took it like a man,” Rotunno said in a press conference after the trial’s verdict. Weinstein exited court without his walker, which a friend wheeled out separately. With his hands cuffed in front of him, he couldn’t have used the device on his own, anyway. (He’s in a wheelchair now, but a prison-issue walker may be possible later, said Weinstein’s spokesperson Juda Engelmayer.) When the court officers came for Weinstein, they hauled him out of his seat by his arms. They walked on either side of a limping Weinstein, shouldering his weight as he slid his feet along the floor. He looked like a person learning how to ice skate, legs churning needlessly at a moment when his body’s motion through space was in someone else’s hands.

He awaits a prison sentence for crimes in which he used his body and power as weapons. His four-week trial had revealed the deterioration of both. Weinstein’s transport to jail on Monday was diverted to a hospital when he complained about chest pains. He suffers from diabetes. His back issues necessitate the walker. According to trial testimony, his genitals may have suffered disfiguring injury. Weinstein’s third-degree rape victim Jessica Mann testified that he required penile injections for sex. When Rotunno unsuccessfully argued to keep Weinstein out of jail, the lawyer revealed another medical issue: “He’s currently receiving shots in his eyes so he does not go blind.” Rotunno has for months presented Weinstein’s battle as one against “the swinging pendulum” of gender politics and sexual power, as she said in the trial’s closing statement. And even in defeat—perhaps because of the defeat—she touted his strength and masculinity.

But he was too weak to go directly to jail.

Bill Cosby also lost his vision while being tried for sexual assault. Found guilty at his second trial, after the first ended in mistrial, the comedian is serving a 3-to-10-year prison sentence. After Weinstein’s verdict, Cosby’s publicist Andrew Wyatt issued a press release. The two men’s convictions, Wyatt said, “should haunt all Americans, especially wealthy and famous men.”

Or just wealthy and famous rapists. “Rape is rape,” Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance said at a press conference after the verdict. “It’s rape, whether it’s committed by an indigent person or a man of immense power, prestige, and privilege.” He stood at a podium next to the American flag and New York’s state flag, which—among other imagery—shows Lady Liberty trampling a crown.

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, the Italian-Filipina model whose sexual assault allegation Vance declined to prosecute in 2015, came to the courthouse after Weinstein’s verdict too. Joining the media scrum on the sidewalk outside the courthouse, she said she was “jumping for joy” over the verdict. “Everyone tried to cover up for him,” she told the Hollywood Reporter of her experience in 2015, when at the behest of the NYPD she wore a wire to a meeting with Weinstein. She subsequently outsmarted Weinstein’s lawyers to preserve audio from that meeting, according to journalist Ronan Farrow, who published the recording in his first report about Weinstein’s alleged abuses for the The New Yorker in October 2017.

“I really feel that now we are changing that,” Gutierrez continued, speaking of those who seemed to provide cover for Weinstein in 2015. “That’s actually the biggest victory, to have people opening eyes and understanding what's going on.”

“His power is not working anymore,” she said. “I don’t think he’s of a healthy mind.”

— How Annabella Sciorra revealed the true theatrics of the Harvey Weinstein trial?
— Who would defend Harvey Weinstein?
— Why can’t Harvey Weinstein put away his phone?
— Inside the surreal search for 12 impartial Weinstein jurors
— What does justice look like for 30 Weinstein accusers?
— Inside Harvey Weinstein’s frantic final days

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