Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced rapist, is not expected to be released from prison anytime soon, despite a state appeals court in fresh York ruling that he is entitled to a fresh trial.
The New York State Court of Appeals shockingly reversed Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction on Thursday morning. This comes many years after the #MeToo movement of 2017, which was partially sparked by claims of the producer made by numerous A-list Hollywood actresses. The justices chastised a lower court for permitting several unrelated witnesses to testify horrifyingly about their private interactions with Weinstein.
“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 court’s 4-3 decision said according to the AP. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
The court’s majority said, “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.”
Judge Madeline Singas disapproved of Weinstein’s narrow victory, writing in her dissent that most of her colleagues were “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative” and that this was a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”
“The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Singas wrote.
After being convicted guilty of multiple criminal sex offenses, including third-degree rape of an emerging actress in 2013 and forced oral sex on a TV and film assistant in 2006, Weinstein, 72, was less than four years into a 23-year sentence. He will stay incarcerated because of a different Los Angeles conviction in 2022, where he was convicted guilty of a second rape and received a 16-year sentence extension. In a third trial, he was found not guilty.
Women’s rights advocates who achieved significant progress in the workplace after coming forward to discuss their experiences with everything from verbal harassment to sexual predation have been severely harmed by the ruling. The legal landscape for convictions of sexual assault has been limited by the release of former comedian Bill Cosby, who was convicted of rape during a 2018 trial and given a 10-year sentence. He was freed after just three years, and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal from a Pennsylvania court to overturn his conviction.
Once a formidable and intimidating force in Hollywood, Weinstein is currently serving a sentence of more than 160 miles (100 miles) in the Mohawk Correctional Facility in New York. His notable films include “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction.”
