"What Harvey Weinstein’s Overturned Conviction Means for Donald Trump’s Trial."

A good title. It's something I was trying to parse on my own yesterday.

The article is at The New Yorker, written by Ronan Farrow. Subheadline: "The legal issue behind Weinstein’s successful appeal is also at the heart of the former President’s hush-money case." The subheadline in my head was: Big man brought down by sex. Or should it be: Pile everything together and the monster will be visible?

Consider this: Farrow's book about Weinstein was called "Catch and Kill" (commission earned), and in Trump's trial, David Pecker has been testifying about the National Enquirer’s "catch and kill" scheme. 

From a CBS News story about Trump's lawyer's cross-examination of Pecker:

Pecker said he first gave Trump a heads up about a story in 1998.... [Trump's lawyer Emil] Bove had Pecker walk through negative stories that he had killed about other figures, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods.

Pecker said AMI [the company that owned the National Enquirer] bought the rights to a story about Woods and obtained unspecified photographs to use as leverage to get Woods to grant an interview with and appear on the cover of Men's Fitness, another AMI publication. Pecker also said AMI helped obtain and suppress stories about the actor Mark Wahlberg and Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama's first chief of staff and later the mayor of Chicago.

Would all those men be monsters too — Schwarzenegger, Woods, Wahlberg, Emanuel — if their antagonists could just heap up all the stories the Enquirer killed for pay?

Let's read Ronan Farrow:

The idea that juries should consider only the crimes charged in a given case, and that evidence of other bad acts should be excluded, is a foundational principle of criminal law, designed to protect defendants from the unfair presumption of guilt.... There are vast exceptions to the general prohibition of evidence of uncharged acts.... Writing for the majority [in the New York Court of Appeals], Judge Jenny Rivera argued that testimony from women with allegations other than the ones Weinstein was charged with “served no material non-propensity purpose”....

That is, prosecutors can't used this evidence just to show that the defendant has a propensity to commit this crime.

... and that allowing prosecutors to cross-examine Weinstein about unrelated acts “undermined” his right to testify....

Weinstein chose not to testify after the trial judge ruled that, if he did, the prosecution could cross-examine him about things he supposedly did. To quote the court opinion: "hid a woman’s clothes; insisted that members of his staff falsify a photo for a movie poster by photoshopping a female actor’s head on another woman’s nude body... abandoned a colleague by the side of the road in a foreign country... threatened to cut off a colleague’s genitals with gardening shears; screamed and cursed at hotel restaurant staff after they told him the kitchen was closed... threw a table of food." 

Trump's case is like Weinstein's, Farrow writes, because it "turns on evidence about acts for which he is not being charged."

... Trump faces thirty-four counts of business fraud related to a payment from his attorney Michael Cohen to the adult-film actress Stephanie Clifford.... But the judge in that case, Juan Merchan, has also admitted evidence of other payments, made by American Media Inc.... that the prosecution says establish motive, intent, and what it describes as a broader conspiracy to sway the election. 

This week has been dominated by testimony from David Pecker, the former chief executive at A.M.I., on payments by the tabloid company to “catch and kill” a rumor that Trump fathered a child with an employee and the story of an affair he had with a Playboy model, Karen McDougal. 

Should Trump take the stand, Merchan has also allowed prosecutors to ask him about other cases against him: a fraud case in New York against his business and civil suits for sexual abuse and defamation brought by the writer E. Jean Carroll....