New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction over allegations of rape and ordered a redo, arguing that the judge at the landmark trial acted improperly.
“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the state court of appeal’s said in its decision. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
Co-founder of the blockbuster production firm Miramax Pictures (and later the independent film studio The Weinstein Company), 72-year-old Weinstein was once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He has been behind of some of the entertainment industry’s most-lauded films — including Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love, The King’s Speech and The Artist — and, as Quartz reported in 2017, has been one of the most thanked individuals at the Oscars. In total, the films he worked on have won more than 81 Oscars since 1999.
But that was before a New York Times investigation exposed a decades-long pattern of sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact in 2017. In the months that followed, many women spoke out about their experiences with Weinstein, which included allegations of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. Coverage of the case set off a movement that came to be known as #MeToo.
The New York court said Thursday that “it is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character” but is unrelated to the charges levied against them.
The judge in Weinstein’s 2020 trial had permitted three women to testify about allegations that weren’t part of the case and said prosecutors could confront Weinstein over his history of behavior if he testified. Weinstein did not testify in that trial.
Judge Madeline Singas dissented and said the majority was “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative” and continuing a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”
Weinstein has been serving a 23-year sentence in a New York prison after he convicted for a first-degree criminal sexual act and rape in the third-degree. He was also required to register as a sex offender.
Weinstein will remain in jail as he carries out the 16-year sentence he was ordered to serve by a judge in Los Angeles in 2022. He was found guilty of rape and two sexual assault charges, although he was acquitted of sexual battery against one Jane Doe. The jury in that trial could also not reach a verdict on allegations from another Jane Doe and Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom.