Recommendations: media you might like

Dear Readers,

I am going to try to publish more shorter newsletters. My aim is to provide you with valuable information you don’t get elsewhere. Sometimes it will be original reporting. At other times it will be recommendations. Let’s start with the latter.

Harvey Weinstein is set to go to trial in Los Angeles later this month. It’s his second sexual assault trial and it will take place just before She Said, the movie about the reporters who broke the Weinstein case, is released. His first trial, held in New York in January and February 2020, was not as big a news event as I would have expected given the incredibly dramatic testimony.

Which brings me to my first recommendation. If you want to get ready for the LA trial and the movie, listen to the amazing podcast, The Harvey Weinstein Trial: Unfiltered. No cameras were allowed in the courtroom at this trial so the producers hired actors to reenact the testimony directly from the transcripts. The actors are brilliant and the key parts of the trial are all captured. When I recently read Ken Auletta’s Hollywood Ending about the rise and fall of Harvey Weinstein, I noticed that he didn’t, as far as I could tell, quote anything from the trial that wasn’t on the podcast. Back in 2020, I was on tenterhooks waiting for every new episode. And after recently re-listening, I can say it’s just as riveting now as it was then.

If, like me, you’re following the release from prison of Adnan Syed of Serial podcast fame, the reliably excellent Prosecutors: Legal Briefs podcast, episode 17 explains the relevant law behind what’s going on. If you listen, you’ll know more than most of the other lawyer pundits I’ve heard commenting on this case.

And speaking of Syed, the Baltimore Sun has done some excellent reporting on Bilal Ahmed — one of the State’s supposed new suspects, mentioned in last week’s Courthouse Stories — although the newspaper still doesn’t name him. I’m guessing the judge who released Syed may be starting to wonder if she got played and I’m curious to see if the Sun will follow up.