In a 4-3 ruling, the New York Court of Appeals has overturned former Hollywood producer and studio executive Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for rape.
The court found there was grounds to overturn Weinstein’s conviction on the grounds that the judge in his case had prejudiced the jury in allowing women to testify against him who alleged assaults by Weinstein that he was not on trial for at the time. The case will now be retried in New York.
Judge Jenny Rivera wrote of the court’s decision “We reaffirm that no person accused of illegality may be judged on proof of uncharged crimes that serve only to establish the accused’s propensity for criminal behavior … 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.”
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Despite his rape New York conviction getting overturned, Weinstein will not be released from the prison in New York where he is currently serving his sentence. In 2022 he was convicted in a second rape case, this one in Los Angeles. He received a 16 year sentence for that conviction. In that case, Weinstein was convicted on three counts: sexual penetration by a foreign object, forcible oral copulation, and forcible rape. The charges all came from an incident involving a single woman, who claimed that Weinstein had assaulted her in 2013 at a Los Angeles hotel.
The same jury acquitted Weinstein of sexual battery involving another woman; a mistrial was declared on several additional charges involving other women.
When the allegations against Weinstein, at the time one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, came to light in 2017 they helped spark the #MeToo movement. The story of how Weinstein’s actions were brought to light have already been depicted in a film, 2022’s She Said.
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