Judge orders CAA co-founder to finish deposition in Julia Ormond's Weinstein lawsuit

A New York judge has ordered Michael Ovitz, the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, to sit again for questioning in a sexual-assault lawsuit brought by actress Julia Ormond, after he walked out of a deposition in June rather than answer questions about his relationship with the late financier Jeffrey Epstein.

In a ruling issued Thursday, Justice Adam Silvera of the New York Supreme Court denied Ormond's request to hold Ovitz in contempt and have him arrested, but he also rejected Ovitz's bid for a protective order that would have blocked further questions about Epstein and struck references to him from the deposition transcript. The judge found that the June session "was inappropriately terminated by non-party Ovitz" and ordered him to appear for its continuation "until completion" no later than Dec. 18, according to coverage of the decision by The Hollywood Reporter and Variety.

A deposition cut short

Ovitz, 79, is not a defendant in Ormond's suit. He is being questioned as a non-party witness about what CAA knew of Harvey Weinstein's conduct while he ran the agency Ormond says represented her in the mid-1990s. According to TheWrap's account of the June 1 session, Ovitz answered questions about Weinstein for roughly 47 minutes of a scheduled three-hour deposition, at one point calling him a "bully," before Ormond's attorneys asked whether he had ever visited Epstein in St. Barts. Ovitz replied, "What does this got to do with Harvey Weinstein?", said he would not discuss Epstein, removed his microphone and left the room.

Ormond's lawyers — Kevin Mintzer, Meredith Firetog of Wigdor LLP and Effie Blassberger of Clayman Rosenberg Kirshner & Linder — followed with a motion seeking sanctions, contempt and a bench warrant, arguing that emails show Ovitz remained socially connected to Epstein after Epstein's 2008 conviction as a sex offender and that the relationship bears on how CAA's leadership judged Weinstein's own alleged misconduct. Silvera did not grant the contempt motion, but he left the door open to more Epstein-related questioning when the deposition resumes.

The case against CAA

Ormond, the British actress known for "Legends of the Fall" and "Sabrina," sued Weinstein, CAA, Miramax and the Walt Disney Company in October 2023 under New York's Adult Survivors Act, a since-expired one-year window that let people revive otherwise time-barred sexual-assault claims. According to her attorneys' own account of the case, filed on her behalf, Ormond alleges Weinstein sexually assaulted her in December 1995 after CAA sent her to a business dinner with him. The suit accuses Weinstein of battery, Disney and Miramax of negligent supervision, and CAA of negligence and breach of fiduciary duty for allegedly failing to warn or protect a client it knew to be at risk.

• October 2023 — Ormond files suit in Manhattan under the Adult Survivors Act.
• August 2024 — A state judge denies motions by Disney, CAA and Miramax to dismiss the case, allowing discovery to proceed.
• March 2026 — The court compels Ovitz, who had skipped an earlier scheduled session, to sit for deposition and turn over related documents.
• June 1, 2026 — Ovitz appears but ends the deposition after being asked about Epstein.
• Oct. 8, 2026 — Silvera denies contempt but orders the deposition completed by Dec. 18.

All three corporate defendants have fought the claims. CAA has said it takes allegations of sexual assault seriously but maintains, as it did when the suit was filed, that there is no basis for holding the agency liable, and it has told reporters, including Rolling Stone, that it continues to see no legal or factual basis for Ormond's claims against it. Weinstein, who is serving a 16-year prison sentence following convictions in New York and California, has denied assaulting Ormond.

Why Epstein matters to the case

Ovitz left CAA in 1995 to become president of Disney, a tenure that ended abruptly the following year with a severance package that made him one of the best-paid executives in American corporate history; he has not run a major talent agency since. His attorneys have argued that questions about Epstein, who died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, were designed "purely to harass him" and have no bearing on the Weinstein-era conduct at issue in Ormond's suit. Ormond's legal team counters that Ovitz's documented ties to Epstein — including correspondence referenced in discovery material from the broader Epstein files — go to his credibility and judgment as a witness describing what CAA's leadership knew, and should have known, about predatory behavior by men in its orbit.

"The decision makes clear that Mr. Ovitz was not entitled to storm out of the deposition," Ormond's attorneys said in a statement following the ruling, adding that their earlier court win was "a complete repudiation of CAA, Disney and Miramax's attempts to evade accountability."

What happens next

Under Silvera's order, Ovitz must return to finish the deposition by Dec. 18, and the judge has not ruled out further questioning about Epstein when it resumes. The court's written order compelling Ovitz's earlier testimony shows the same judge has also protected Ormond's confidential mental-health records from discovery by the defendants, denying CAA's bid to obtain them, while a summary of that ruling from Ormond's own legal team notes it also rejected CAA's attempt to vacate the discovery order entirely.

The ruling keeps Ormond's three-year-old case — one of several Weinstein-adjacent suits still working through New York courts under the Adult Survivors Act — moving toward eventual trial or settlement, while adding Ovitz's deposition to a small but growing set of entertainment-industry proceedings in which Epstein's social ties to Hollywood figures have resurfaced as a discovery issue rather than a settled matter of history. Neither CAA nor representatives for Ovitz responded to requests for comment on Thursday's order relayed by trade outlets covering the case.