Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Editor’s Note: On Monday, January 14, 2019, shortly after this story went to press, the New York Post reported that Weinstein and Brafman may be parting ways due to disagreements over the direction of the case. The day after, Brafman confirmed his intention to leave; on January 25, the judge overseeing the case granted him permission to do so. Weinstein, with a new legal team, is scheduled to go on trial in June. This story appears in the March ’19 issue of Esquire.

Is Benjamin Brafman a bad man because he helps (allegedly) bad people? He thinks not. “I’m not the morality police,” he tells me one afternoon several months ago at his firm, Brafman & Associates PC. “I’m a criminal- defense lawyer.”

But what if the client is Harvey Weinstein, the former film mogul now facing charges of sexual assault involving two women—and similar allegations from dozens more? Brafman leans back, places his palms on the table, and narrows his eyes, like I’ve just questioned Earth’s roundness. “I’ve spent forty years trying to get to the top of my profession, and this is the most high-profile case in the United States,” he says. “It’s flattering to be picked by someone like him.”

Brafman, seventy, likes to be flattered. “Do you know Jay-Z’s song about me?” he asks, seventeen minutes after we meet. The track, “Welcome to New York City,” is actually by Cam’ron, but Hova provided a guest verse name-checking the attorney. In 1999, the budding entrepreneur was accused of stabbing a man he suspected of bootlegging his next album. Brafman landed him a sweetheart plea deal: three years’ probation, zero days in prison. In his verse, Jay-Z raps, “Got Brafman defending me / ’Cause New York’ll miss me if I’m locked in the penitentiary.” A picture of the two—Brafman’s five-six frame rising to just above Jay’s shoulder, even with the added inch from his signature crest of slicked-back hair—sits among dozens of mementos on top of a credenza.

Framed images and awards cover the office, the corner one, on the twenty-sixth floor of a midtown Manhattan high-rise. Celebrity clients get prime wall real estate: There’s Martin Shkreli, the self-styled Pharma Bro (securities fraud); Plaxico Burress, the Giants’ star receiver (attempted criminal possession of a weapon); Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing agitator (illegal campaign contributions). All either pleaded to lesser crimes or dodged the top charges. Sometimes, when the evidence is overwhelming, you hire Brafman just to cushion your fall.

Curiously, victories over some of his most notable adversaries are not memorialized. In 1995, he successfully defended a Long Island town official accused of taking kickbacks; Loretta Lynch, the future U. S. attorney general, was the federal prosecutor on the case. “If he wants to yell and scream, fine,” she told a reporter about Brafman’s courtroom style. “Maybe it’ll make it go by quicker.” In 2003, another federal prosecutor, James Comey, the future FBI director, accused a Brafman client of siphoning $700,000 from a government grant “to line his own pockets.” Brafman struck a deal with the feds in which his client paid back the money and walked free.

Michael Jackson is also absent from the display, though that’s probably because he fired Brafman. Or Brafman quit, depending on whom you ask. “There are clients who have a view of how to defend the case which you think is entirely inappropriate,” he says, careful not to name names. “I’m a successful guy. I can afford to give back a fee.”

Brafman is one of New York’s best trial attorneys. In court, he’s a natural performer, always in motion, often pacing, slicing his hand through the air as needed to emphasize his outrage at the injustice heaped upon his clients. One day I watched his opening statement in defense of a businessman accused of bribing postal workers so they’d send vehicles to his body shops. The evidence was insurmountable, but Brafman delivered a compelling show nonetheless. He was dressed sharply—he owns more than a hundred ties and once modeled for a Paul Stuart ad—and he sermonized with smoldering urgency about the aging fleet of USPS trucks. “Fasten your seat belts,” he told the jury. “This is as real as it gets.” As we left the courtroom, I overheard a group of prosecutors who’d come just to watch the proceedings. “How ’bout Brafman?” said one, impressed with the performance. His colleague’s response: “You should see him when he actually has something to say.”

Brafman’s cross-examinations are the stuff of legend, and he’s renowned for his way with juries, not least because he’s funny. One of his well-worn quips: “The prosecution wants you to believe their side of the story. I wish I were taller. But we can’t always get what we want.” Prosecutors may roll their eyes, but jurors always laugh. A moment like this creates a sort of transference: Trust me, he seems to say to the jury, and, by extension, Trust my client. “Cases don’t get decided with facts or evidence,” says Carrie Goldberg, who’s representing one of Weinstein’s accusers. “They get decided on storytelling, and Ben is a masterful storyteller. This is the stuff they don’t teach in law school.”

Brafman practices white-collar criminal defense, which is not a legal specialty so much as an economic one: Almost everyone who hires him is wealthy. He refuses to discuss his rates, but evidence in a 2009 lawsuit filed by a disgruntled client shows Brafman & Associates charged fees totaling $1,027,058.75, and that didn’t include the trial. Since white-collar crime isn’t limited to financial wrongdoing, and since Brafman has been at it for four decades, you’d be hard-pressed to think of a felony charge he hasn’t defended. He names some of the open cases he and the six attorneys he employs are handling, and the list is as diverse as it is disturbing: a real estate developer who allegedly ran a massive Ponzi scheme, a landlord who supposedly harassed impoverished tenants until they moved out, a man accused of running a sex cult in Albany. Brafman, the son of Holocaust survivors, says the only people he won’t defend are terrorists. “If someone charged with mass murder came to me, I would tell them, ‘My family was murdered because of hate. You deserve a good lawyer; it just shouldn’t be me.’ ” When I ask Mark Baker, Brafman & Associates’ appellate lawyer, about the upcoming sentencing of a client convicted of soliciting child pornography, he isn’t sure which case I mean. “I have several kiddie porn,” he says with a shrug.

Ambra Battilana alleges Weinstein groped her breasts in a business meeting in 2015. Independent Photo Agency Srl/Alamy

Brafman maintains a varied caseload. Otherwise, he says, “you can get pigeonholed.” In the late eighties, as the government began to dismantle the American Mafia, Brafman represented a few made men—including Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, John Gotti’s right-hand man—but turned down many more. “I didn’t want to be known as a Mob lawyer,” he says. In 1990, while defending a man accused of drug trafficking—who, as it turns out, was a capo in the Bonanno crime family—Brafman defeated the government using its own recordings from a wired informer. After that, he avoided narcotics cases for a while. “I didn’t want to be known as a drug lawyer, either,” he says.

But certain clients were so big, and his success in winning what seemed to be an open-and-shut case so surprising, they couldn’t help but shape his reputation. In 2011, he represented Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, who was accused of forcing a Guinean housekeeper to perform oral sex at a Manhattan hotel. Hours after the incident, Strauss-Kahn, once considered a contender for the French presidency, was pulled from his first-class seat on a plane at JFK and sent to an eleven-by-thirteen cell on Rikers Island. The media pounced: One of the most powerful white men in the world was pitted against a poor, black, female asylum seeker. Strauss-Kahn acknowledged the sexual encounter happened, but he maintained it was consensual. The defense hired a private investigator who found evidence favorable to their client, including a recording of the housekeeper telling a friend, “Don’t worry, this guy has a lot of money. I know what I’m doing.” They turned over the P. I.’s findings about the woman to prosecutors, who concluded that they were left “unable to credit her version of events beyond a reasonable doubt.” All charges were dropped. The newly minted Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., came under fire for overlooking the risks of a swift indictment because he was blinded by the potential rewards of the highest- profile case in his tenure. But if the outcome was partly due to the government’s missteps, it was also a feat of good defense lawyering. In the end, Brafman, representing a man with vast wealth and power, shut down the accusations of a disenfranchised woman with what seemed to be a credible defense.

Though it was not Brafman’s first victory in a sexual-assault case, it was his most publicized, and more accused men reached out. In 2014, he represented Sanford Rubenstein, a fellow veteran of New York’s courts, who was accused of rape by a woman after they’d attended Al Sharpton’s sixtieth-birthday bash. The Manhattan district attorney’s office—still led by Vance—declined to pursue charges, citing a lack of evidence. The headline in The New York Times, above a photograph of Brafman and Rubenstein, read, "High-Profile New York Lawyer Won't Face Rape Charges." When Brafman’s wife, Lynda, saw the story, she joked to her husband of forty-seven years, “I didn’t know you raped anyone.” The framed clip hangs in a prominent spot in his office, just above the credenza.

Whether he courted the work or his success thrust it upon him, Brafman’s reputation was cemented. “If you’re a high-profile person indicted in a sex-crimes case, I might be on a short list,” he says. Or as he told a jury during a recent trial, “This is what you do in America: You find a need and you fill it.” So it came as no surprise when, in the fall of 2017, Harvey Weinstein asked him to take his case.

“The heart of the Weinstein case is that there’s a piling-on,” Brafman explains one day last August. It’s a Friday, and he’s dressed down in jeans and a blazer. “Nobody vets the allegations. What they do is count the bodies.” We are once again in his office; he likes to meet on his own turf. Even his celebrity clients will make the trip when summoned, though they get to take the service elevator to avoid attention. “When a person is vilified the way Harvey’s been, it’s time for a person like me to shine.”

If Brafman speaks of Weinstein as a martyr, it’s by design. “I’ve never been a fan of indictment by the newspaper, or destruction by movement,” he tells me. But what he really means is that the public outcry gives him a narrative to work against: He can claim his client is not a predator but a victim—of overzealous prosecutors on the hunt for a sacrificial celebrity, and of populist outrage, which, during the fall of 2017, took shape in the form of the #MeToo movement.

Lucia Evans (left) claims Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex in 2004. She retained Carrie Goldberg (right), who describes her practice as “the victims’-rights law firm that ruins everything for psychos, pervs, trolls, and assholes.” Courtesy, John Lamparski/Getty Images

Brafman uses a metaphor to explain the unique circumstances brought by high- profile cases: His client is a swimmer caught in a cultural riptide, and he’s the lifeguard trying to save him. Brafman first deployed this tactic in the case of eighties nightlife king Peter Gatien, who was accused of running a narcotics empire out of his clubs. The current was New York City’s crackdown on drug dealing, and Lifeguard Brafman reported for duty. Verdict: not guilty. He used it again when Sean Combs, known then as Puff Daddy, faced bribery and gun charges after a shooting in a packed Manhattan club; the riptide was hip-hop’s perceived threat to the hearts and minds of America’s youth. Verdict: not guilty.

The current in the Weinstein case is the #MeToo movement. “One day it’s Charlie Rose. Then it’s Kevin Spacey. Matt Lauer. Les Moonves. Suddenly they have something about Judge Kavanaugh from when he was in high school? Give me a break,” Brafman says. “I have a daughter; I have granddaughters. I’d like them to not have to deal with harassment, discrimination, and an unequal pay scale. But a movement becomes dangerous when it generates the kind of hatred that keeps a person from getting a fair trial.” He adds that this time around the current has been elevated to “a tsunami.” What he doesn’t acknowledge is that Harvey Weinstein is the force who began the swell.

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In October 2017, a New York Times exposé revealed eight allegations of sexual misconduct against the movie producer that stretched across decades. Five days later, in The New Yorker, thirteen more women came forward, including three who said Weinstein had raped them. The accusers—more than eighty and counting—range in age from their twenties to their sixties. Some, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Lupita Nyong’o, are actors; others are professors, and producers, and former assistants. Their stories paint a damning picture of a serial predator, who, they say, stage-managed his meetings, in hotel suites and nondescript offices, so that he wielded all the power and the women had none. If they threatened to go public with an accusation of harassment or worse, he offered them hundreds of thousands of dollars for their silence. If that didn’t work, his lawyers unleashed private investigators, former Mossad agents among them, to uncover dirt that could be used as leverage. And as he got wind that women were talking to reporters and the walls started closing in, Weinstein personally oversaw a campaign to kill the stories before they ran.

“The heart of the Weinstein case is that there’s a piling-on,” Brafman explains one day last August.

His attempts failed, and his flameout was swift. Less than seventy-two hours after the Times story appeared, the Weinstein Company fired him. The company—worth between $700 million and $800 million “in a worst-case scenario” just two years earlier, according to Weinstein—filed for bankruptcy and was sold to a private-equity firm for $289 million. During the bankruptcy proceedings, a copy of Weinstein’s employment contract surfaced, revealing that the company had accepted his behavior as a matter of course. In instances when it owed settlements for cases involving his actions, he would pay the company on a sliding scale: $250,000 for the first “person damaged by such misconduct,” $500,000 for the second, $750,000 for the third, and a million for each additional woman.

To date, Weinstein has been named in nearly two dozen civil suits. Officials in New York, Los Angeles, and London are conducting criminal investigations. Last May, he was hit with the most urgent legal crisis of all: The Manhattan D. A.’s office, still headed by Vance, announced that Weinstein was under arrest.

By then, the producer had already retained Brafman, who arranged for Weinstein to turn himself in to the First Precinct station house in Lower Manhattan. Weinstein was perp-walked out of the precinct and brought to Manhattan Criminal Court, his arms pinned behind his back by three sets of handcuffs strung together to accommodate his girth. Brafman met him there, and together they listened to the charges: first-degree criminal sex, which stemmed from a complaint brought by Lucia Evans, a marketing consultant who claims Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex in 2004, when she was a college student and an aspiring actress; and first- and third-degree rape, based on the allegations of a woman, not publicly identified, who says Weinstein attacked her in 2013 at a Manhattan hotel. Brafman turned over his client’s passport and a $1 million check for bail. Outside the courthouse, he told reporters, “Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch.” His intended point: Weinstein’s behavior was sleazy but not criminal.

Weinstein on his perp walk, on May 25, 2018. His arms were pinned behind his back by three sets of handcuffs strung together to accommodate his girth. Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

The public wasn’t buying it—nor was Vance. In July, his office announced more charges prompted by a 2006 incident involving a former production assistant, Mimi Haleyi, who alleges Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her. If convicted of the top charges, he faces twenty-five to life.

Brafman tells me he would much rather talk about his client’s career than his alleged transgressions. “Weinstein is maybe the most brilliant moviemaker of my generation,” he says. “Some of his movies are among my all-time favorites. I’ve watched Pulp Fiction ten times. I know the dialogue. You make a movie like that, you’re a genius. You make a movie like The King’s Speech,you’re a genius. You make a movie like Shakespeare in Love, you’re a genius.” Brafman doesn’t need to be told his client was actually the moneyman, not the creative visionary. For him, spinning the facts is as natural as blinking.

But when it comes to Weinstein’s role as a defendant, Brafman’s tone shifts. To hear him describe it, the producer has thrown himself into his legal strategy with the same ferocity he showed while campaigning for Oscars or attempting to silence his accusers. Weinstein sends his lawyer dozens of emails a day, and he leaves voice mails if he doesn’t hear back. “He’s a hands-on client,” Brafman says. “He’s relentless.” (He also doesn’t have much else to do: Under the terms of his bail, he wears a monitor and cannot travel outside Connecticut, where he lives, and New York without permission.)

Mimi Haleyi (left) claims Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her in 2006. She retained Gloria Allred (right), who represented several of Bill Cosby’s accusers. dpa picture alliance/Alamy

Weinstein seeks advice on much of Brafman’s strategy from a coterie of other lawyers and advisors, but Brafman doesn’t take this as a slight. “Harvey is the type of guy who gets a second opinion on his tuna salad,” he says. When I ask him to describe Weinstein’s personality, he pauses. “He’s a nice guy, sometimes. I can say to him, ‘You can’t tell me to go to hell, because you need me.’ ” Then, in a regrettable choice of phrasing: “I take the abuse better than most.”

Twice a week, Brafman wakes at sunrise and greets his personal trainer at the door of his large Colonial home in Lawrence, New York, on the South Shore of Long Island, just past JFK. The area, known as the Five Towns, is a collection of affluent communities that has become an enclave for Orthodox Jews like Brafman. In his basement gym, he endures a forty-five-minute workout. He likes working the heavy bag, and for a particular reason—he imagines it’s the face of an opponent, and for five minutes he pummels that person. “I’m punching without getting arrested, so it’s very good for me,” he says. Lynda brings him breakfast, which is always the same: Cheerios in a red Solo cup so that he doesn’t need to clean the dish. Then he showers, dresses, and climbs into the backseat of a Lincoln Continental—piloted by the same driver for more than twenty years—in order to start the workday on his way to Manhattan to fight anew.

“Harvey is the type of guy who gets a second opinion on his tuna salad,” Brafman Says.

Brafman is a born fighter. Before they met at a mixer for new immigrants, his parents, Sol and Rose, fled Europe to escape the Holocaust. On Kristallnacht, in Vienna, Sol rescued a Torah from a synagogue, then smuggled it out of the country in a shroud, telling border agents it was his child’s body. Rose crossed the Atlantic alone at fifteen. Her parents, sister, brother-in-law, and niece died at Auschwitz.

The shadow of the Holocaust hung over Brafman’s youth, shaping who he would become. Every time he returned to the family’s apartment, even after taking out the trash, he had to shout until his mother felt safe enough to click open the front door’s five locks. He internalized these anxieties, believing his survival, and that of his loved ones, relied on his ability to fight harder, and smarter, than his adversaries. “You must know the terror, not only to make you sad and angry but to make you vigilant,” Brafman wrote in a speech titled “I Was Murdered at Auschwitz,” which he delivered at his synagogue in 2011.

From his father, Brafman learned that vigilance will only get you so far. After three years in the U. S. Army, Sol got a job as a pattern cutter at his older brother’s lingerie company. He stayed there for forty years, and while his brother made a fortune, Sol did not. Brafman and his three siblings wore their cousins’ hand-me-downs; their uncle’s family was rich, and they were poor. “It was something that bothered me my whole life,” Brafman tells me.

A bad student, Brafman began working at ten, first as a busser and then as a waiter in the beach communities of the Rockaways, the sandy peninsula that hugs the southern edge of Queens. In his teens, he did the same at Catskills resorts. At eighteen, he hawked Monkees shirts outside Forest Hills Stadium.

Roger Kisby/Redux

Brafman was always adept at making the most of every opportunity. He took night classes at Brooklyn College, where he met his first mentor, Steve Solarz, a professor who’d go on to serve in Congress. Solarz wanted to run for state assembly, but he wasn’t sure how to connect with the Yiddish-speaking community in Brighton Beach. Brafman, who is fluent, snagged a job on the campaign and, after Solarz won, ran the district office. His job was to field constituents’ requests—things like replacing urinals in public bathrooms. Each task was an education in navigating government bureaucracy and people’s idiosyncrasies.

Brafman decided to apply to law school, but with lousy grades and no connections, he landed at Ohio Northern University. It was a school few distinguished lawyers had heard of, but in the sleepy town of Ada, Ohio, with little to distract him, Brafman thrived. He became an editor of the law review and graduated near the top of his class. “I always felt smart,” Brafman says. But law school “was the first time in my life I felt book smart.”

As a student, Brafman discovered his love for criminal defense—the drama, the high stakes, the bare-knuckle brawls of trials. He spent the first summer of school interning for the Brooklyn D. A.’s office, where he worked in the courthouse up to fourteen hours a day, studying the system from the government’s perspective. For his second summer, in 1973, he set his sights on McGuire & Lawler, one of the top white-collar defense firms in New York. He cold-called Bob McGuire, who told him noncommittally to swing by the office the next time he was in the city. Brafman hung up, grabbed his only suit, maxed out his credit card to catch the next flight to New York, and called McGuire the following morning. Amused, McGuire agreed to meet and ended up offering him a summer internship. For one early assignment, Brafman wrote a memo that was so good it was submitted as a motion to the court, and the case, involving a man charged with impersonating a police officer, was dismissed. Brafman received $300 as a reward. “I felt rich,” he tells me.

After graduating, Brafman became the firm’s only associate. While Lynda got a degree in library science and raised their two children, Brafman outcompeted attorneys with fancier degrees. “People who get into a place like Harvard end up taking the Philosophy of Law and other courses that have no application,” he says as if he can’t imagine a bigger waste of time.

“When a person is vilified the way Harvey’s been, it’s time for a person like me to shine.”

In 1976, Robert Morgenthau, the legendary Manhattan D. A., hired Brafman as an assistant district attorney in the rackets division. Over the next four years, Brafman tried twenty-four cases and won all but one. Law firms took notice of the young ace and wooed him with lucrative offers. He was reluctant to say no to a salary five times higher than what his father ever earned, but he didn’t want to work for anyone but himself.

So he approached Lynda with a deal: If he couldn’t build his own practice in six months, he’d work for one of the big firms. In 1980, with a $15,000 loan from Lynda’s grandparents, he rented the ground floor of a townhouse on the Upper East Side, bought some furniture and a typewriter, and waited for the phone to ring.

As word of mouth spread, his caseload became larger and more diverse, but the staff at his firm remained small: him, his receptionist, and an occasional associate. He preferred it that way: a tight-knit team with no confusion about who was in charge. Charles Ross, a trial lawyer he hired in the early nineties, says of his former boss, “He wasn’t just a Johnny One-Note kind of trial lawyer. He was an amazing cross-examiner. He ripped the heart out of witnesses, and he did it in a very skilled way. He was a great orator, and he read the law.” Ross, who left in 2005, says he learned a lot from Brafman. “Ben taught me how to talk to clients about money. He had a very developed sense of when to offer what kind of fee.”

Cyrus Vance Jr. faced criticism for giving preferential treatment to the wealthy and powerful. He declined to press charges against Weinstein in 2015. Jeenah Moon/The New York Times/Redux

Those fees rose as Brafman took on more prominent cases and started generating his first tabloid headlines. In 1990, he represented the only defendant fully acquitted in the trial for the notorious, racially charged murder of a black teen by a gang of white men in Bensonhurst. In 1997, he defended Daphne Abdela, fifteen, who was accused, along with another fifteen-year-old, of stabbing a middle-aged acquaintance in Central Park. Multiple accounts implicated Abdela, the privileged child of a wealthy couple on the Upper West Side, as the instigator, but Brafman crafted a new narrative: The accomplice, a working-class kid with a history of mental illness, was the mastermind. Brafman arranged a plea deal in which Abdela admitted to being present for the murder and was not required to testify against the accomplice in court. That year, New York named Brafman the city’s “Best Criminal Defense Lawyer.”

Had that been the height of Brafman’s career, his renown wouldn’t have extended much beyond the Holland Tunnel. But then, in 2000, he got a call. Several weeks after a chance introduction, Johnnie Cochran, by then one of the most famous lawyers in the country, asked Brafman to join the defense team for a client facing gun and bribery charges and in need of a New York lawyer. That’s how Puff Daddy became Brafman’s first famous client. Then, as these things tend to go, more delinquent celebrities came calling.

Although Brafman has his work cut out for him on the Weinstein case, he benefits from institutional advantage. Sexual-assault laws—with their statutes of limitation and disregard for how trauma can cloud a victim’s memory—skew cases in the perpetrator’s favor. Only six out of one thousand rapists ever see the inside of a prison, according to the Department of Justice. “ ‘He said, she said’—they’re very easy cases,” Brafman says. “It’s not reviewing a hundred thousand emails. It’s not interviewing fifteen hundred people.” It’s simply pitting one person’s word against another’s.

In cases like Weinstein’s, where the defendant maintains that the sexual acts were consensual, Brafman has one mission: to undermine the women’s credibility. He doesn’t do it all on his own. Like most criminal- defense lawyers, he relies on private investigators to conduct opposition research on the government’s witnesses. Unlike most lawyers, he works with P.I.’s who are scarily well-equipped. I ask Marc Agnifilo, a phenom trial lawyer in his own right who has worked at Brafman & Associates for twelve years and whom Brafman calls his “heir apparent,” how he finds people he can trust. “You get people from reliable places,” he tells me. “D. A. squad, Secret Service. The mandatory retirement age for the FBI is fifty-seven, and when agents leave, they do private-investigation work.” When you hire Brafman, you’re paying for the type of black-glove service that only the most connected attorneys can provide.

For the Weinstein case, he deployed Herman Weisberg, whose knack for convincing scorned lovers not to blackmail married men has earned him the nickname the Mistress Whisperer. “Whatever success I may have in the Weinstein case, Herman has played a substantial part,” Brafman told the Daily Beast. “He has extraordinary success to date in helping me uncover materials which demonstrate that several of the important prosecution witnesses in this case may have not told the truth.”

Herman Weisberg, aka the Mistress Whisperer, is a former NYPD detective whom Brafman hired to help the defense. NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images

Brafman calls in backup when needed. For Weinstein, he retained his friend Alan Dershowitz to help with a complicated bit of legal maneuvering. When the Weinstein Company fired its cofounder, it confiscated his computers, and the bankruptcy court handling the proceedings froze access to the company servers. “Harvey had told us that if we secured his emails, they would be a treasure of exculpatory evidence,” Brafman says. In motions filed with the bankruptcy judge, he and Dershowitz argued that they weren’t on a fishing expedition for dirt on Weinstein’s accusers; they needed specific exchanges for their client’s defense. (No matter how easy Brafman considers he-said cases, even he cannot avoid the tedium of reviewing email records.)

Brafman now has Weinstein’s electronic correspondence dating back twenty years. When we met in late summer, Brafman had just filed a motion to dismiss all charges that Vance brought against his client. (The judge denied it.) His argument: The grand jury hadn’t seen the four hundred messages that Weinstein and the unidentified accuser had exchanged. In one, the woman wrote, “I appreciate all that you do for me, it shows.” In another, sent after the alleged rape, she wrote, “I love you, always do. But I hate feeling like a booty call :)” Brafman tells me the emails are “the antithesis of what you would see from a communication of a real rape victim to her alleged rapist.”

Brafman is smart to release the emails piecemeal, each revelation timed for maximum impact; he can claim he is uncovering the truth, not arguing against it. But his logic rests on the premise that rape cannot occur if two people sleep together consensually over a period of time. This defense strategy may have worked in the past, but today, it no longer tracks—especially given that two thirds of rape victims know their attackers, according to the Department of Justice. When pressed on his position, Brafman concedes that, sure, “as an intellectual exercise,” rape between consensual partners could happen, but it didn’t this time.

The contradiction is glaring: Brafman is quick to chastise the court of public opinion for presuming his client’s guilt, but he doesn’t think twice about citing circumstantial emails as evidence that a woman is lying about her assault. “The defense always wants everyone and anyone to be on trial other than their own client,” Gloria Allred, who represents Haleyi in the criminal case, recently told NPR. “ ‘Let’s put the police on trial. Let’s put the prosecution on trial. Let’s put the whole #MeToo culture on trial’ ”—everyone, she said, “except Harvey Weinstein. But I’m not distracted from who the actual defendant is.”

Early last October, exactly one year after the Weinstein exposé ran in the Times, I meet Brafman at the cafeteria in the Southern District of New York’s federal courthouse to discuss how, against all odds, he has started turning the case in Weinstein’s favor.

Brafman’s eyes are reddened at the edges; the bags underneath them are puffier than usual. He has just wrapped the sentencing hearing for the client convicted of soliciting child pornography. “I hate the agony of defeat,” he says as he picks at a Cheerios single-serve cereal cup. (The defendant, who was facing up to thirty years in prison, ended up with a seventeen-year sentence.) As the conversation turns to Weinstein, Brafman’s mood lightens.

That day, the tabloids report that the government’s case might be in peril because Lucia Evans’s story has been undermined by police misconduct. When I ask Brafman if he fed the story to reporters, he points a finger at an NYPD leak. “You can’t be a crime-beat reporter in this town if you don’t have a mole at every precinct,” he says.

A week later, the prosecution unseals a letter that supports what Brafman hinted at: The lead detective on the case, Nicholas DiGaudio, failed to notify prosecutors of a statement by a friend of Evans’s that contradicted her own. Brafman argues that Evans is no longer a credible witness. The judge agrees, and he dismisses Evans and her charge from the case. (It’s later revealed that DiGaudio encouraged the unnamed accuser in the case to delete information from her phone before turning it over as evidence; instead, her lawyer told the D. A.)

It’s a stunning change of momentum. "Is the Weinstein Case in Jeopardy?" reads one New York Times headline. Six charges against Weinstein have become five, and three accusers have become two. But more important, by undermining the government’s credibility, the detective has strengthened Brafman’s defense.

The government has given him plenty to work with. Manhattan D. A. Vance’s handling of the Strauss-Kahn case cast a pall over his early years in office. Vance has redeemed himself to a degree: He cracked down on underage prostitution. He collaborated with the Department of Justice to help clear the backlog of untested rape kits nationwide. His sex-crimes prosecutors have won more than 80 percent of their cases. But then, in the wake of the Weinstein exposés, he came under fire for not prosecuting the producer when he first had the chance.

In 2015, an Italian model named Ambra Battilana filed a criminal complaint against Weinstein for allegedly groping her breasts in a business meeting. The next day, wearing a wire, she caught him on tape apologizing. The police turned over the recording to the D. A., who dropped the case. When that decision came to light in 2017, the D. A.’s office released a statement. “While the recording is horrifying to listen to,” it read, “what emerged from the audio was insufficient to prove a crime.” The excuse didn’t cut much ice with NYPD brass, who took offense at Vance blaming his decision on shoddy police work, or with Governor Andrew Cuomo, who announced last March that the New York attorney general would review the D. A.’s handling of the case. That investigation was put on hold after Vance arrested Weinstein, and Cuomo announced that the inquiry would wait until Weinstein’s criminal case has been resolved. His message to Vance, however, was clear: Don’t screw up this time.

" 'He said, she said'-they’re very easy cases. It’s not reviewing a hundred thousand emails. It’s not interviewing fifteen hundred people."

The debacle pulled back the curtain on what many perceive to be a legal system rigged in favor of power and wealth. Criticism grew when the International Business Times revealed that Weinstein’s attorneys at the time, Elkan Abramowitz and the legendary litigator David Boies, had donated more than $75,000 to Vance’s campaigns over the years. Denying preferential treatment, Vance announced in early 2018 that he would no longer take donations from attorneys with cases before his office.

Brafman has also donated to Vance, multiple times, for close to $5,000. (To be fair, he’s also contributed many times more than that to charitable causes.) Such contributions are not unusual—virtually all D. A.’s accept money from the defense attorneys they regularly face in court—which made Brafman all the more miffed when Vance returned his money last year. “This perception that you give his campaign a couple of thousand dollars and then he’s going to make decisions in your favor is just bullshit,” Brafman says—before explaining precisely what advantage it brings him. “What I have, so long as I don’t abuse it, is the ability to call Vance and say, ‘I really need to speak to you about a case, because I don’t think what your office is doing is right. I’d like to speak to you personally about it.’ ”

In fact, Brafman has known Vance for years; both were featured, along with Cuomo, on a chart The New York Times published in 2009 titled “A Powerful Bench,” about the most successful alums of the Manhattan D. A.’s office. The framed clipping sits, of course, on Brafman’s credenza. The connections don’t stop there. In his former life as an NYPD detective, Weisberg, the P. I., was handpicked for an assignment with the D. A. and worked under Vance for a few years. Vance’s and Brafman’s deputies know each other too: The district attorney’s chief assistant prosecutor, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, is married to Marc Agnifilo. She must recuse herself from all Brafman & Associates cases, ensuring that the D. A.’s office is hamstrung every time it charges one of the firm’s clients. “Cy might have missed my wife in the DSK case,” Agnifilo tells me, “and he probably misses her on Weinstein too. I would imagine she’d be useful.”

Brafman likes to say that the defendant’s chair is the loneliest seat in the world: how small one person is when set against the government. But the seat becomes a lot less lonely when Brafman and his Rolodex are by your side.

In early November, Brafman files a second motion for the entire Weinstein case to be dismissed. When he did so earlier, he admitted that it was a “long shot,” which, coming from him, was akin to saying it would fail. Now it’s at least in the realm of possibility. “You had extraordinary media attention and a drumbeat demanding Weinstein’s public execution, the facts be damned. The overwhelming sentiment was ‘Indict him and don’t sweat the details because he’s low-hanging fruit,’ ” he tells me. “Now they’re stuck with what I think is a bad case.”

In response to Brafman’s motion to dismiss, prosecutors shoot back, accusing him of trying to turn the proceedings into “a public circus.” His next filing accuses the D. A.’s office of caving in to media pressure and moving forward on a flimsy case. Prosecutors don’t respond to that one, so Brafman pokes a little harder: In early December, he files another motion with emails showing that Weinstein and his unnamed accuser had attended a screening hours after she alleges he raped her. Prosecutors respond this time, writing, “The defendant has a misguided and antiquated view of how a rape victim should react.” The judge will decide on Brafman’s second attempt to throw out the case on December 20.

Nicholas DiGaudio (right) led the Weinstein investigation—that is, until the D. A. uncovered evidence saying he was coaching witnesses. He was removed from the case after an internal investigation. Broadimage/REX/Shutterstock

Brafman and I meet two days before, again in the Southern District cafeteria. As we talk, he snacks on a bag of potato chips, placing each one on a napkin and breaking it with his index finger before eating the smaller pieces. He says that Weinstein has been frustrated with him because he has other clients. The producer has been firing off emails and leaving increasingly urgent voice mails. “I told him, ‘Harvey, you don’t want a lawyer that has no other clients,’ ” he says, which has only slightly placated the producer. For the past several days, Brafman has returned to his office after court around 6:00 p.m. to find Weinstein “lurking around,” ready to strategize. Which means Brafman hasn’t been going to sleep until 3:00 a.m. But, as before, he’s reinvigorated by the news on the Weinstein case.

“Did you read the Hollywood Reporter story about me?” he asks. “It quotes some of the best lawyers in the country saying how great a job I’m doing.” He spreads his hands, palms upward, and opens his eyes wide, like it’s the craziest thing. (The lawyers it quotes are men Brafman has known for decades; one is the father of a current Brafman associate.) “I haven’t leveled the playing field, but we’re in a much different posture than we were three months ago,” he says. Public attention has shifted away from the crimes his client allegedly committed and onto the three-way brawl involving Brafman, the D. A., and the NYPD. “The case is in a state of complete disarray,” he says. “The D. A. and the police are blaming one another. And the two women who remain have substantial baggage.”

“He’s a nice guy, sometimes.” Brafman says of Weinstein. “I take the abuse better than most.”

The morning of the December 20 hearing, news crews are camped outside the New York Supreme Court, and police officers monitor the action. Spectators and photographers are situated along the dark hallway to the courtroom. Though Jennifer Lawrence is rumored to show up, she doesn’t. But Marisa Tomei and Amber Tamblyn do, along with fellow supporters of Time’s Up, #MeToo’s Hollywood-centric counterpart. Carrie Goldberg, the victims’-rights lawyer, is here, as is Gloria Allred. The doors open, and the seats fill quickly; many in line are turned away. Inside, as the room waits for Weinstein to arrive, the anticipation is palpable. Finally, a message comes through on a court officer’s radio: “They’re in the elevator, coming up.”

When the doors open, cameras flash into the courtroom. Brafman enters first, wearing a gray suit and a bright orange tie. Weinstein, in a dark blue suit, limps in behind him. He’s put on weight since his court appearance last May, and his neck is blanketed with scruff the color of day-old snow. His left hand remains clenched. He looks confused. After making his way to the front of the room, he sits and stares straight ahead. The judge calls Brafman and the prosecutors up to the bench to confer privately, while the rest of the room remains silent, their breath bated. Five minutes pass, and it’s impossible to decipher what’s being said. But as Brafman returns to his seat, he eyes the crowd, and his tortured expression says it all: His Hail Mary motion to dismiss the five remaining charges was unsuccessful. The case will be going to trial. The judge sets the next hearing for March 7, and court is adjourned.

Outside, Weinstein climbs into a black SUV and speeds off. Brafman steps in front of a gaggle of cameras and microphones and gives a few remarks about how he’s disappointed with the judge’s decision, but that his client will ultimately prevail. He walks to the curb, where his Lincoln awaits, and then he, too, is gone.

The morning after the hearing, Brafman calls me. “I guess your article will be delayed because nothing happened,” he says. Before that week, he’d had a glimmer of hope that the case would be tossed. But that’s no longer on the table.

Brafman will almost certainly return his strategy to undermining the accusers’ credibility—not just of the two who remain in the case but of every woman who’s come forward with allegations. He speaks ominously of the thousands of emails at his disposal that he says he’ll continue to roll out on an as-needed basis. Yet he may well find that the strategy fails him. When he said that Weinstein didn’t invent the casting couch, he was evoking a bygone era, when behavior now considered reprehensible was the status quo. But that time has passed, as Brafman himself once admitted to me when I asked him about the comment. “It’s a different world,” he said then. As he now tells me on the phone, the case “will be messy. It will be controversial. It will be all-out combat.”

With the trial tentatively set to begin in early May, Brafman now faces months of battle with the D. A.’s office—and months of Weinstein’s emails, voice mails, impromptu office visits, and second-guessing. “This puts a lot on my plate I was hoping to avoid,” he says.

Benjamin Brafman has spent forty years climbing to the top of his profession, along the way becoming a wealthy and charitable man—with sixteen grandchildren he adores—and this is his reward: several months, maybe more, in the trenches with Harvey Weinstein.

This article appears in the March '19 issue of Esquire. Subscribe Now