I don’t understand. If the witnesses allegations “were not related to the charges at hand,” then they shouldn’t affect the outcome of the trial, right?
Supposedly, it’s because a lot of the witnesses were also claiming to be victims, but also had never reported the attacks. It’s important to remember that his trial basically started the #MeToo movement, and his defense has basically managed to leverage that to go “these other witnesses weren’t relevant, because he was only on trial for the two rapes.”
Basically, imagine you’re on trial for a robbery you never committed. You’re a serial robber, but none of your victims have ever come forward. Then for this one particular robbery case (which you didn’t do) the floodgates open and all of your previous victims start popping up to go “oh yeah he definitely robbed me but I never reported it.” Again, you didn’t commit this specific robbery, and your previous robberies shouldn’t factor into your conviction on this case because you didn’t do it this time. It would be a miscarriage of justice to allow those previous victims to influence your current case.
If those victims wanted you convicted for their robberies, they’d need to come forward and accuse you of it for their specific case. But that isn’t what happened; They just attached themselves to an entirely separate robbery case, for robberies you had never been convicted of in the past.
To be clear: I 100% believe he did it. But this is how the courts are looking at his case. Instead of facing 80 separate charges, he faced 2 charges with 80 unrelated witnesses.