Manhattan prosecutors must now decide whether to retry Mr. Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer whose sexual abuse case sparked the #MeToo movement.
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Live Updates: Harvey Weinstein’s Conviction Is Overturned by New York’s Top Court
Manhattan prosecutors must now decide whether to retry Mr. Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer whose sexual abuse case sparked the #MeToo movement.
Harvey Weinstein, who was once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, was convicted of sex crimes in New York and California.Credit...Desiree Rios for The New York Times
Updated
April 25, 2024, 9:28 a.m. ET6 minutes ago
6 minutes ago
Jonah E. Bromwich and
Maria Cramer
New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges, a stunning reversal in the foundational case of the #MeToo era.
In a
4-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals found that the trial judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case had made a crucial mistake, allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses a series of women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him.
Citing that decision and others it identified as errors, the appeals court determined that Mr. Weinstein, who as a movie producer had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, had not received a fair trial. The four judges in the majority wrote that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior.
Now it will be up to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg — already in the midst of a trial against former President Donald J. Trump — to decide whether to seek a retrial of Mr. Weinstein.
It was not immediately clear on Thursday morning how the decision would affect Mr. Weinstein, 71, who is being held in an upstate prison in Rome, N.Y. But he is not a free man. In addition to the possibility that the district attorney’s office may try him again, in 2022, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison in California after he was
convicted of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel.
Mr. Weinstein was accused of
sexual misconduct by more than 100 women; in New York he was convicted of assaulting two of them. The Court of Appeals decision, which comes more than four years after a New York jury found Mr. Weinstein guilty, complicates the disgraced producer’s story and underscores the legal system’s difficulty in delivering redress to those who say they have been the victims of sex crimes.
April 25, 2024, 9:31 a.m. ET
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