By MICHAEL R. SISAK, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Harvey Weinstein has hired Luigi Mangione and Sean “Diddy” Combs’ lawyers to represent him at his third New York rape trial, reshaping his legal team after declining to end the matter with a guilty plea.

The lawyers, Jacob Kaplan, Marc Agnifilo and Teny Geragos, confirmed the move in court papers Tuesday. They take over for Weinstein’s longtime lawyer, Arthur Aidala, who ceded his courtroom role to focus on the ex-studio boss’ appeals and pending civil matters.

Kaplan was a member of Weinstein’s original defense team in 2018 and is expected to have a leading role in his defense at the third trial, which involves a charge that the Oscar-winning producer raped hairstylist and actor Jessica Mann in a Manhattan hotel in 2013.

At a hearing in January, Weinstein insisted he “never assaulted anyone” and said his “spirit was breaking” after nearly six years behind bars.

Related Articles

Judge says he will order Greenpeace to pay an expected $345 million in oil pipeline protest case

Cuba says it killed 4 people aboard Florida-registered speedboat that opened fire on soldiers

Crews in Florida battle a 25,000-acre wildfire near detention center

Trump administration’s ‘third country’ deportation policy is unlawful, judge rules

World Trade Center’s last office tower soon will get built and house American Express

The trial, postponed from a March 3 start, hasn’t been rescheduled. Weinstein is due in court March 4 for a status conference. Legal publication Law360 first reported the legal team shake up.

Kaplan and Agnifilo are representing Mangione in his parallel state and federal cases in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. They succeed in getting terrorism charges thrown out in the state case and the death penalty barred in the federal case.

Agnifilo and Geragos represented Combs, achieving a split verdict and acquittals on sex trafficking and racketeering charges, and currently are among the lawyers defending wealthy brothers Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander at their sex trafficking trial in Manhattan federal court.

Kaplan, Agnifilo and Geragos are all partners at the Manhattan firm Agnifilo Intrater.

“Harvey believes that, after two prior trials on this matter, a recalibrated outlook and strategic approach offers the most effective path forward,” Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer said.

In a messy split verdict last June, Weinstein was convicted of forcing oral sex on one woman, Miriam Haley, acquitted of forcibly performing oral sex on another woman, Kaja Sokola, and the jury didn’t decide on the rape charge involving Mann. Deliberations ended when the foreperson refused to participate further.

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Haley, Sokola and Mann have done.

Weinstein and his lawyers argued that the retrial verdict was tainted by infighting and bullying among jurors. Judge Curtis Farber, who will also oversee the third trial, rejected that, telling Weinstein at the January hearing: “You had a fair trial.”

At his first trial, in 2020, Weinstein was convicted of raping Mann and forcing oral sex on Haley, but New York’s highest court overturned those convictions and ordered last year’s retrial. The Court of Appeals ruled that Weinstein was prejudiced by testimony about allegations that weren’t part of the case.

Weinstein and Aidala, who argued the appeal and represented Weinstein at his original trial and retrial, appeared to come to a mutual and amicable agreement about the lawyer’s shifting role.

“Our work does not end here,” Aidala said. “We will continue to advocate forcefully on his behalf in the appellate courts, where we are confident that serious legal errors will be addressed and his most significant conviction will ultimately be overturned.”

Kaplan, Agnifilo and Geragos are in the midst of several high-profile cases, including Mangione’s state trial slated to begin June 8, which could affect the timing of Weinstein’s trial. Even without accusers other than Mann, prosecutors have said it could take up to five weeks.

Weinstein faces up to 25 years in prison for the charge he was convicted on: first-degree criminal sex act involving Haley. The unresolved third-degree rape charge involving Mann is punishable by up to four years — less than he already has served.

The Oscar-winning producer has been behind bars since his initial conviction in 2020, and was sentenced to prison in a separate California case that he is appealing.

Last Thursday, I awoke before dawn to the news that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former prince, had been arrested in England on suspicion of misconduct related to his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. I immediately thought of the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the brave survivor of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking ring who’d won a civil settlement from Mountbatten-Windsor after she accused him of rape (and whose memoir I co-wrote).

My next thought was this: So far, only about half of the 6 million documents that comprise the Epstein files have been released, but in the UK their contents are already causing heads to roll. Why isn’t that happening here in America? I know at least part of the answer.

Since the Jan. 30 release of 3.5 million pages of Department of Justice investigation files, many concerned citizens around the globe have been trying, in earnest, to wade through the muck. It’s not an easy job. Part of that seems to be by design. The documents are not organized to help readers understand their context. Instead, each page is just one fragment of an exploded jigsaw puzzle, and trying to assemble that puzzle without all the pieces (and without knowing what a complete picture should look like) is proving difficult for even the most seasoned experts on Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes.

In the ensuing avalanche of news stories, boldface names have grabbed the spotlight — Epstein helped director Woody Allen’s daughter get into college, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick spent time with his family (and nanny) on Epstein’s island, supermodel Naomi Campbell asked to fly on Epstein’s plane. But, despite the valiant efforts of so many outspoken survivors, the heart of this vile conspiracy has been oddly pushed into the background: the brutal reality of what it felt like to be a girl caught in Epstein’s web.

Imagine you’re a 14-year-old girl, recruited by an older female, who is being led into an upstairs room in Epstein’s Palm Beach, Florida, mansion. The man you’ve been told to call “Jeff” enters wearing only a towel and tells you to take off your clothes. You are afraid. Trapped. So you eventually strip down to your underwear. He orders you to do things to him. He masturbates. He gives you $300 and tells you to leave your phone number so he can summon you again. Imagine that you later get into a fight at school with a classmate who calls you a prostitute. Imagine that you are later involuntarily admitted to a juvenile-education facility “because of disciplinary problems that recently escalated.”

I worked for four years with Giuffre on her memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” and the scenes I’ve just asked you to imagine are in her book. But Giuffre is not the girl at the center of that story (Giuffre was 16 — two years older — when Maxwell lured her into their den). No, the story above describes the experiences of one of more than 30 underage victims that Florida investigators interviewed in 2005 and 2006, which led to Epstein’s first arrest and, ultimately, his conviction as a sex offender. The girl in that story had her life ruined two decades ago. Imagine.

Now we know that hundreds if not thousands of girls and young women were abused by Epstein and Maxwell and their crony friends. And yet the cruel undoing of these young people keeps falling off the front pages. Is it because it’s too upsetting to imagine? Is it because it’s old news?

I’m a journalist, so I understand news cycles. But I’m still bothered by the way the visceral suffering at the core of this rotten story isn’t consistently claiming its rightful place at the front of our minds. I get it: There is so much to read about Epstein these days. But by letting our attention be drawn toward talent agent Casey Wasserman’s sexting with Maxwell, say, or by Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi’s meltdown about the high-flying Dow Jones Industrial Index being what really matters, we risk losing the plot.

This, for the record, is the plot: In 1996, a 14-year-old girl named Annie Farmer was flown to Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, where Maxwell told her to undress and began to massage her breasts; later, Epstein jumped into bed with her, saying he wanted to cuddle. This kind of grooming behavior was experienced by scores of girls and young women, many of whom reported it to the authorities. And this abuse often escalated into rape.

For Giuffre, what followed was being forced to sexually service Epstein and Maxwell’s influential friends. In sworn depositions that have been made public, Giuffre named Mountbatten-Windsor and several others of these men, all of whom issued strong denials. Some of these co-conspirators’ names have popped up in the latest tranche of public files, but Giuffre is no longer here to hold them to account, having died by suicide last April.

Only by holding our focus on what these girls and women endured will Americans have the fortitude to demand that the Trump administration give us our due. Some survivors say they can’t find their interviews in the files that have been released so far, which proves that the Department of Justice has still not met the requirements of the Epstein Transparency Act. The solution is clear: Release the remaining 2.5 million pages in the Epstein files, with only the survivors’ names redacted. Next, law enforcement must rigorously interrogate the men and women who exchanged chummy emails with Epstein and played in his hideous sandbox. Until these two things occur, basic accountability and justice will remain out of reach. Even just based on what we already know, we should all find that unimaginable.

Amy Wallace is a journalist and author who collaborated with Virginia Roberts Giuffre on her memoir, “Nobody’s Girl.” She wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

This month, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the individual entrusted with safeguarding the health of 330 million Americans — posted a 90-second video of himself and Kid Rock doing shirtless calisthenics in blue jeans, riding a stationary bike in the sauna, doing a slow-motion cold plunge and toasting glasses of whole milk in the pool. The internet responded with memes and mockery. I sat in my office at UCLA, where I’ve practiced pulmonary and critical care medicine for more than 40 years, and I did not laugh.

I felt the anger, real anger.

Because here’s what was not in that video: the more than 2,200 Americans who contracted measles in 2025, in a country that effectively eliminated the disease in 2000. The three who died. The more than 900 confirmed cases already reported in the U.S. in 2026. The children in South Carolina — totaling nearly 1,000 cases from a single outbreak— whose parents were persuaded by rhetoric this secretary spent decades amplifying about how the MMR vaccine was more dangerous than the disease.

It is not. Decades of rigorous science have shown it is not.

When the absurd reaches a certain pitch, mockery is a natural defense. But I worry we’ve become so numbed by spectacle, so conditioned to treat governance as entertainment, that we’ve lost our capacity for the emotion this moment demands: genuine outrage. The real thing. The kind that mobilizes physicians, parents and legislators to say, “This is not acceptable.”

Let me be precise about what Kennedy has done in his first year as HHS Secretary, because the shirtless antics are designed to distract you from it.

He fired all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — the expert panel that has guided national vaccine policy for decades — and replaced them with vaccine skeptics.

He forced out Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Susan Monarez.

He cut National Institutes of Health funding, gutting cancer research and addiction treatment programs.

He stopped federal support for mRNA research — one of the most significant advances in the history of immunology, being developed for vaccines against multiple sclerosis, influenza and certain cancers. When the FDA initially rejected Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine this month on what experts called ideological grounds, only public backlash forced a reversal — during one of the worst flu seasons in modern history.

Then, last month, Kennedy gutted the childhood immunization schedule, reducing universally recommended vaccines from ages 11 to 17. Hepatitis A, hepatitis B, rotavirus and influenza were relegated to “shared clinical decision-making” — a bureaucratic euphemism for abandonment. Routine recommendations trigger automatic prompts in electronic medical records and allow nurses to vaccinate under standing orders. Shared decision-making requires a physician at every vaccination decision, creating bottlenecks that will reduce uptake among the more than 100 million Americans without regular primary care access.

During Kennedy’s 2025 confirmation hearings, he told senators under oath: “I support vaccines. I support the childhood schedule.” Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican physician from Louisiana, voted to confirm Kennedy explicitly on those pledges.

Every pledge has been broken.

The lone Republican who voted against him — Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, a polio survivor — warned his colleagues. They did not listen. Trust in the CDC has since plummeted from 66% to 54%. Confidence in MMR vaccine school requirements among Republicans has fallen 27 points in just six years.

These are not poll numbers. They are harbingers of future outbreaks, future hospitalizations, future deaths.

I’ve seen this before. I was an intern at UCLA in the early 1980s when the first cases of what we would come to call AIDS appeared on our wards — young men dying of infections we had never seen in previously healthy patients. I watched an institution and a government fail to respond with the urgency a nascent epidemic demanded, and I watched people die because of that failure. The lesson was not subtle: When public health leadership falters, when ideology supplants science, when the people in charge decide that politics matters more than medicine, people die. Not in the abstract. In beds. In hospitals.

I am watching it happen again. The United States is poised to lose its measles elimination status — an achievement that took decades to build. Kennedy’s newly appointed CDC deputy Ralph Abraham responded to this prospect by calling it “just the cost of doing business.” Three people died of measles in this country last year. The cost of doing business.

So, when I see the secretary of Health and Human Services drinking whole milk in a pool with Kid Rock, I do not see comedy; nor should the response be memes or sarcasm. I see a man who bears direct responsibility for the resurgence of vaccine-preventable disease in the most medically advanced nation on Earth, performing a grotesque pantomime of wellness while children get sick. That is not a joke. It is a scandal. And it is long past time we treated it as one.

Robert B. Shpiner is a clinical professor of medicine at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, with over 40 years of ICU experience at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. He wrote this column for the Los Angeles Times.

INDIANAPOLIS — There has been some gray area surrounding the Vikings ever since they fired Kwesi Adofo-Mensah out of nowhere.

This is a photo of Rob Brzezinski of the Minnesota Vikings NFL football team. This image reflects the Minnesota Vikings active roster as of Friday, June 16, 2023. (AP Photo)

Never mind that it was announced last month that Rob Brzezinski would serve as the acting general manager on a temporary basis through the 2026 NFL Draft before a permanent hire is made. It wasn’t clear if he was simply operating as a figurehead for the organization while Kevin O’Connell operated in the shadows.

There was some clarity provided on Tuesday afternoon inside the JW Marriott in Indianapolis. As much as the Vikings plan to be collaborative in their approach over the next couple of months, Brzezinski relented that the Wilfs have given him final say over O’Connell if push comes to shove.

“Obviously we have to have protocol in place,” Brzezinski said. “The owners have asked me to handle that responsibility.”

As soon as he clarified the structure the Vikings have in place, Brzezinski emphasized that he will work in concert with O’Connell, ensuring that everybody is on the same page heading into a pivotal stretch that could define the organization for the foreseeable future.

“We’re going to work very, very closely together to make sure that the personnel staff and the coaching staff are aligned,” Brzezinski said. “We’re just going to stack decisions here in this time period.”

That response perfectly encapsulates why the Wilfs have entrusted Brzezinski to navigate the current situation. Not only has he been a longstanding member of the Vikings since 1999, serving in a number of different roles in that span, he has long been somebody whose superpower is getting everybody to pull on the same rope.

“He’s unbelievable with people,” O’Connell said. “He knows how to connect people and bring out the best in people. That’s what we need right now. That’s what Rob has brought and will continue to bring.”

MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA – JANUARY 04: Head coach Kevin O’Connell of the Minnesota Vikings looks on prior to a game against the Green Bay Packers at U.S. Bank Stadium on January 04, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The ability to build consensus will serve as a compass for Brzezinski over the next couple of months as the Vikings work through a number of important items on their checklist.

Though the most pressing issue is finding another quarterback to compete with J.J. McCarthy for the starting job, there’s also the hurdle of getting the Vikings under the salary cap and putting together the big board ahead of the draft.

All of it will require Brzezinski to lead with a combination of conviction and grace.

“It’s been about getting everybody aligned and on the same page,” Brzezinski said. “A really important thing is for everybody to be themselves and be able to constructively challenge each other.”

It was hard to ignore the fact that Brzezinski acted and sounded like a general manager during the 30 minutes he chatted with reporters. Asked if he’d like to be considered as a candidate for whenever the Wilfs make the permanent hire, Brzezinski also struck the right tone, replying, “I can say that right now that I’m focused on the next couple of months.”

Meanwhile, O’Connell seemed to go to bat for Brzezinski on multiple occasions, which has to matter to some degree. Asked what has stood out about Brzezinski in their time working together, O’Connell heaped praise on the experience he brings to the table, replying, “He has been through situations where he can recall those experiences and really provide guidance.”

If anything is clear about Brzezinski beyond his resume, it’s how deeply he cares about the organization as a whole. He has built a life in Minnesota over the past few decades. He would love nothing more than to be the person that helped the Vikings get over the hump.

“There is a special connection here,” Brzezinski said. “Our fans deserve to see this organization raise the Lombardi Trophy.”

Not that he’s putting too much pressure on himself as the person suddenly calling the shots.

“We can’t manufacture or force what’s not there because that’s when we’ll make a mistake,” Brzezinski said. “We’re going to do everything we can over the next couple of months to make sure the Vikings are going in the right direction to attain our ultimate goal.”

The Minnesota Vikings’ brain trust, photographed at Vikings headquarters in Eden Prairie on Oct. 28, 2003, includes, from left, Rob Brzezinski, vice president of football operations, Scott Studwell, director of college scouting, Mike Tice, head coach, and Paul Wiggin, director of pro scouting. (Jean Pieri / Pioneer Press)

Related Articles

Do the Vikings still believe J.J. McCarthy can be a franchise quarterback?

Vikings receiver Rondale Moore dies at 25

Walters: We’ll learn soon how comfortable the Vikings are with J.J. McCarthy

Frederick: Hopefully, Kevin O’Connell learns from Mike Macdonald

Raiders introduce new coach Klint Kubiak with a nod to their storied past