A New York appeals court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 felony sex crime convictions on Thursday and ordered a new trial. The disgraced Hollywood producer, aged 72, was previously sentenced to 16 years in prison in a separate rape case in Los Angeles, which remains unaffected by this decision. Reports indicate that he will be transferred to a California prison.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is also involved in the hush-money trial against former President Trump, will determine whether to pursue a retrial of Weinstein. Weinstein’s legal team argued in the appeal that he was unfairly judged based on “irrelevant, prejudicial, and untested allegations of prior bad acts,” according to the court order. The court agreed, stating that “the remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
Jodi Kantor, along with Megan Twohey, broke the sexual abuse allegations against Weinstein in 2017. Kantor, reporting for The New York Times, noted that the case against Weinstein has been fragile “since the day it was filed.” Manhattan prosecutors built their case on the accounts of two women. Other alleged survivors of Weinstein were unable to testify due to reasons such as experiencing sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, or falling outside the statute of limitations.
Additional alleged survivors were called to the stand as Molineux witnesses, aiming to “establish a pattern of predation,” Kantor reported. However, the court ruled that the conviction should only be based on the charges at hand, which did not include these testimonies, according to the majority opinion. The defense also questioned the credibility of complaints against Weinstein, as some alleged survivors admitted to having had consensual sex with him in some instances.
The dissenting opinion criticized the majority for its “fundamental misunderstandings of sexual violence perpetrated by men known to, and with significant power over, the women they victimize.”