Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein owes his former lawyers nearly $500,000 for work they did in four cases brought against him by insurance companies, according to new court documents.
Law firm Abelson Herron Halpern LLP filed five charging liens totaling $420,495 in the lawsuits brought against Weinstein by insurance companies who say they shouldn’t have to pay for the costs of his civil and criminal defenses in the sexual misconduct and assault cases brought against him, Manhattan federal court and Supreme Court papers reveal.
Two lawyers from the firm, Michael Abelson and Leslie Pereira, repped Weinstein until they withdrew from the cases in April. Now they are staking a claim to the money they are owed by putting a lien on the ongoing litigation with the insurance companies in the event that Weinstein recoups money from any of them, according to the court records.
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A rep for Weinstein said, “Michael Abelson is a terrific lawyer and we loved him. We retained Kirk Pasich who is top of his field and Abelson and Pasich are working out the payment issues together.”
Abelson’s lawyer, Timothy Pastore, who filed the charging liens, declined to comment.
Weinstein was indicted on charges he forcibly performed oral sex on production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006 and raped a longtime lover in a Manhattan hotel in 2013.
The Post first reported that “Sopranos” actress Annabella Sciorra is expected to testify at Weinstein’s upcoming Manhattan sex assault trial.
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Sciorra, 59, who starred in the hit HBO mob series as well as the film “True Love,” publicly accused the fallen film mogul of violently raping her in a 2017 New Yorker magazine article.
This is not the first time that a lawyer has gotten into a billing dispute with Weinstein.
Mary Flynn of Morrison Cohen LLP withdrew last October from his insurance cases citing a payment disagreement.
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In April 2018, he split with PR firm Sitrick & Co., who sued him for an allegedly unpaid bill of $352,105. That case was eventually settled out of court.
This article originally appeared on Page Six.
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