NEW YORK (AP) — Harvey Weinstein ‘s #MeToo retrial next month will largely be an abridged version of the original, with one big addition: a charge based on an allegation from a woman who was not a part of the first case.

But at a key pretrial hearing Wednesday, the disgraced movie mogul’s lawyers cautioned that because Weinstein’s 2020 rape and sexual assault conviction was overturned, the past isn’t prologue — it’s almost entirely irrelevant.

“We can take that transcript and all the judge’s rulings and throw them in the garbage,” Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, argued. “That trial was declared illegal by the highest court in this state.”

New York’s Court of Appeals threw out Weinstein’s conviction last year, setting the stage for a retrial in state court in Manhattan. In September, another charge was added based on allegations from a third accuser. The trial will start April 15 and prosecutors say it could take about five weeks.

How the retrial will play out began to take shape Wednesday as Judge Curtis Farber ruled on a number of outstanding issues, including expert testimony and the language used to describe the accusers.

What issues were before the judge?

Farber granted a prosecution request to call a psychologist, Dawn Hughes, as an expert witness on the psychological and traumatic effects of rape and sexual assault. Hughes previously testified for actor Amber Heard at Johnny Depp’s libel trial against Heard in 2022 and as a prosecution witness in singer R. Kelly’s federal sex trafficking trial in Brooklyn in 2021.

The judge also granted a defense request to preclude the term “survivor” from being used to describe Weinstein’s accusers. He told prosecutors to instruct any police officers who testify to refer to the women as “complaining witnesses” instead.

While Weinstein’s convictions from the first trial were thrown out, his acquittals on the most serious charges — two counts of predatory sexual assault and first-degree, or forcible, rape — still stand.

Given that, Farber ordered prosecutors to instruct one of the accusers testifying at the retrial not to used the word “force” when describing her alleged assault.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office had wanted to exclude any mention of Weinstein’s acquittals and vacated conviction, but Farber said he could be obligated to clue them in depending on how the accuser testifies.

“Does she have to use the word force? She can describe what happened and let the jury draw its own conclusions?” the judge asked. “I am not asking her to change her testimony from the first trial. I am asking her to refrain from using the word force.”

Other decisions were made behind closed doors as Farber met with the prosecution and defense for more than an hour in his chambers to discuss matters still under seal.

They included a prosecution request that two of the three accusers in the case be allowed to testify about other alleged encounters with Weinstein. They also discussed evidence of the accusers’ sexual history, which prosecutors say should be barred under New York’s Rape Shield Law.

Weinstein in court

Weinstein, 72, was in court for Wednesday’s proceedings, arriving from jail in a wheelchair and suit and holding a stack of documents. Before the public portion of his hearing began, the ex-studio boss watched as Farber spent a few minutes resolving another matter that had been delayed by their closed-door discussions.

At his last court appearance in January, Weinstein had implored Farber to start the retrial sooner.

He told the judge “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on” with cancer, heart issues and harsh conditions at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex, where he is locked up. Farber said he may hold jury selection a few days sooner if a murder trial he’s overseeing wraps up ahead of schedule.

Weinstein is being retried on charges that he forcibly performed oral sex on a movie and TV production assistant in 2006 and raped an aspiring actor in 2013. The additional charge, filed last September, alleges he forced oral sex on a different woman at a Manhattan hotel in 2006.

Prosecutors said in court papers that the woman, who has not been identified publicly, came forward to them just days before the start of Weinstein’s first trial but was not part of that case. They said they did not pursue the women’s allegations after Weinstein was convicted and sentenced to 23 years in prison, but they revisited them and secured a new indictment after his conviction was thrown out.

Farber ruled in October to combine the new indictment and existing charges into one trial.

Weinstein’s lawyers contend that prosecutors prejudiced him by waiting nearly five years to bring the additional charge, suggesting they had elected not to include the allegation in his first trial so they could use it later if his conviction were reversed.

Weinstein has denied that he raped or sexually assaulted anyone.

In vacating Weinstein’s conviction, the Court of Appeals ruled that the trial judge, James M. Burke, unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations from other women that were not part of the case. Burke is no longer on the bench and such testimony won’t be part of the retrial.

Weinstein was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape. His 16-year prison sentence in that case still stands, but his lawyers appealed in June, arguing he did not get a fair trial.

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) — A Pennsylvania man who was going through security at a New Jersey airport was found to have a live turtle concealed in his pants, according to the federal Transportation Security Administration.

The turtle was detected Friday after a body scanner alarm went off at Newark Liberty International Airport. A TSA officer then conducted a pat-down on the East Stroudsburg man and determined there was something concealed in the groin area of his pants.

When questioned further, the man reached into his pants and pulled out the turtle, which was about 5 inches (12 centimeters) long and wrapped in a small blue towel. He said it was a red-ear slider turtle, a species that is popular as a pet.

The man — whose name was not released — was escorted from the checkpoint area by Port Authority police and ended up missing his flight. The turtle was confiscated, and it’s not clear if the turtle was the man’s pet or why he had it in his pants.

“We have seen travelers try to conceal knives and other weapons on their person, in their shoes and in their luggage, however I believe this is the first time we have come across someone who was concealing a live animal down the front of his pants,” said Thomas Carter, TSA’s Federal Security Director for New Jersey. “As best as we could tell, the turtle was not harmed by the man’s actions.”

He said the incident remains under investigation, and it wasn’t clear if the man would face any charges or penalties.

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Hours after a series of outages Monday that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk claimed that the social media platform was being targeted in a “massive cyberattack.”

“We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources,” Musk claimed in a post. “Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved. Tracing …”

Later on Monday, Musk said on Fox Business Network’s Kudlow that the attackers had “IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area” without going into detail on what this might mean.

Cybersecurity experts quickly pointed out, however, that this doesn’t necessarily mean that an attack originated in Ukraine. Security researcher Kevin Beaumont said on Bluesky that Musk’s claim is “missing a key fact — it was actually IPs from worldwide, not just Ukraine.”

Specifically, he said it was a Mirai variant botnet, which is made of compromised cameras. He said while he is not sure who is behind the attack, it “Smells of APTs — advanced persistent teenagers.”

Allan Liska of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future, meanwhile, pointed out that even if “every IP address that hit Twitter today originated from Ukraine (doubtful), they were most likely compromised machines controlled by a botnet run by a third party that could be located anywhere in the world.”

Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com. By afternoon, the reports had dropped to the low thousands.

A sustained outage that lasted at least an hour began at noon, with the heaviest disruptions occurring along the U.S. coasts.

Downdetector.com said that 56% of problems were reported for the X app, while 33% were reported for the website.

It’s not possible to definitively verify Musk’s claims without seeing technical data from X, and the likelihood of them releasing that is “pretty low,” said Nicholas Reese, an adjunct instructor at the Center for Global Affairs in New York University’s School of Professional Studies and expert in cyber operations.

Reese said the likelihood that a state actor is behind the outages “doesn’t make a lot of sense” given their short duration — unless it was a warning for something larger to come.

“There are kind of two types of cyber attacks — there are ones that are designed to be very loud and there are ones that are designed to be very quiet,” he said. “And the ones that are usually the most valuable are the ones that are very quiet. Something like this was designed to be discovered. So to me that almost certainly eliminates state actors. And the value that they would have gained from it is pretty low.”

Reese added that it’s possible that a group was trying to make a statement with causing X outages, but added that such a temporary outage “is not much of a statement to me.”

“It’s only really a statement if there is some kind of follow on action, which I would not rule out at this point,” he said.

In March 2023 the social media platform then known as Twitter experienced a bevy of glitches for over an hour as links stopped working, some users were unable to log in and images were not loading for others.

“X outage” was trending on rival social media platform BlueSky, with some posts welcoming users to the site and urging them to stick around.

Musk bought the former Twitter in 2022 and also serves as the CEO of Tesla. He’s running X while simultaneously having access to U.S. government data systems — often wearing a shirt that says “tech support.”