On Thursday, the New York Court of Appeals overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex-crime charges and said the producer must receive a new trial. The disgraced movie mogul was serving 23 years in prison for rape in the third degree and criminal sexual assault in the first degree.
The state’s top court said in a 4–3 ruling that the judge who oversaw Weinstein’s trial made two major mistakes. The first was allowing several of the producer’s accusers to testify even though their allegations were not part of the charges against him. The second was allowing prosecutors to question Weinstein about those accusations if he decided to testify; in Weinstein’s appeal, his lawyers said the latter prevented him from testifying. In the majority opinion, the judges wrote, “it is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them.”
In her dissent, Judge Madeline Singas wrote that “the majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability.” She argued that the decision amounted to “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said, she-said narrative” and that in making such a ruling, the court continued a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”
Since allegations against Weinstein first sparked the Me Too movement nearly seven years ago, more than 100 women have accused the producer of sexual abuse spanning decades.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said his office will seek a new trial against Weinstein, who has been serving time in a correctional facility in Rome, New York, if any of his victims choose to participate in the case again. “We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault,” a spokesperson said in a statement.
In the meantime, Weinstein will remain in prison. In 2022, the now-72-year-old was also convicted by a Los Angeles court on one count of rape, one count of forced oral copulation, and one count of sexual misconduct. He was sentenced to 16 years in that case. After he’s processed by New York’s justice system, he will be sent to California to continue serving his sentence.
This story has been updated.
