Six charges down, 46 charges to go.
The blonde British beauty accused of extorting Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman won a small courthouse victory today, when a Manhattan judge dismissed six of the total 52 charges against her.
The dismissed charges in the still-massive indictment against Louise Meanwell do not involve Cashman, however.
Four of the dismissed charges had accused Meanwell, 37, of making harassing phone calls to her ex-husband’s mother and wife back in 2010 and 2011, and were tossed because they’d previously been lodged — albeit later dismissed — in another jurisdiction, Rensselaer County, where the alleged victims live.
The final two dismissed charges was tossed on a technicality — prosecutors had improperly included two separate documents as the basis of a single charge that she’d lied to get a rent-subsidized apartment on Leonard St. in TriBeCa.
“I have no problem going to trial,” the long-haired blonde said as she left court. “I am innocent,” added Meanwell, who has said she is willing to testify against the Yankees manager.
“I’m stronger than I ever was,” she told reporters.
“The wheels are moving forward,” toward trial, added her lawyer, Lawrence LaBrew.
Meanwell is accused of extorting $6,000 from Cashman by threatening to tell his wife and others that she had had a sexual relationship with him in 2011, becoming pregnant and undergoing an abortion. Prosecutors have characterized the relationship as fleeting, and the pregnancy as a fiction.
A trial date has yet to be set by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Daniel FitzGerald.