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Why Didn’t the Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Prosecute the Trumps or Harvey Weinstein? | The New Yorker

Why Didn’t the Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance Prosecute the Trumps or Harvey Weinstein? | The New Yorker: It was reported here last week that, in 2012, Vance ordered his prosecutors to drop a promising criminal-fraud investigation against Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr., who were suspected of misleading potential buyers of condos in the Trump SoHo building; the order came after their father’s attorney, Marc Kasowitz, paid Vance a visit. Soon after Vance’s office dropped the investigation, Kasowitz donated and raised a combined total of more than fifty thousand dollars for Vance’s re�lection campaign.
Immediately on the heels of those revelations came explosive reports, in this magazine and in the Times, of the film executive Harvey Weinstein’s alleged sexual harassment and assault of multiple women in the course of three decades. The reports spurred new scrutiny of the D.A.’s decision, in 2015, not to arrest and prosecute Weinstein for a misdemeanor sex crime, based on Ambra Battilana Gutierrez’s contemporaneous report to police that he groped her without her consent in his Tribeca office. Weinstein’s defense attorneys included Vance’s former law partner Elkan Abramowitz, who was also a donor to his campaign. Weinstein’s attorney David Boies (who did not represent Weinstein in the criminal matter) also donated to Vance in 2015. (Disclosure: I worked as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office thirteen years ago, before Vance was the D.A.)

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