A police detective already facing allegations that he coached a witness in Harvey Weinstein’s criminal sexual assault case was accused on Wednesday of urging one of the movie mogul’s accusers to delete material from her cellphones before she handed them over to prosecutors.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office detailed the alleged misconduct in a letter to Weinstein’s lawyer that was made public.
The new allegations against Det Nicholas DiGaudio involve an unidentified woman who says Weinstein raped her in his Manhattan hotel room in 2013.
In the letter, assistant district attorney Joan Illuzzi-Orbon said during the investigation, prosecutors asked the woman to hand in any mobile phones she might have used during the time when she interacted with Weinstein.
The woman, she said, was willing to do so, but was worried the phones contained, “in addition to communications with the defendant, data of a personal nature that she regarded as private”.
She asked DiGaudio what to do. He advised her to delete anything she didn’t want anyone else to see before handing over the phones, the prosecutors said.
“We just won’t tell Joan,” DiGaudio allegedly said.
Illuzzi-Orbon said the woman did not delete any information and instead asked a lawyer for advice. The phones were turned over “without any deletions”, Illuzzi-Orbon said.
The lawyer hired by the woman contacted the district attorney’s office about DiGaudio’s conduct on 10 October.
Weinstein’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman said the latest allegation against DiGaudio “even further undermines the integrity of this already deeply flawed indictment of Mr Weinstein”.
DiGaudio was removed from the Weinstein case last week after evidence surfaced that he urged a witness to keep quiet when she raised doubts about whether a different accuser’s alleged sexual encounter with Weinstein was consensual.
That revelation led prosecutors to drop a charge related to that allegation.
There was no immediate response from DiGaudio’s union or the New York City police department.