Disgraced Harvey Weinstein Gets Devastating News
Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced rapist, is not expected to be released from prison anytime soon, despite a state appeals court in New York ruling that he is entitled to a new 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 made by numerous A-list Hollywood actresses against the producer.
The justices criticized a lower court for allowing 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 stated, “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“The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Singas wrote.
Despite 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 remain incarcerated due to a separate Los Angeles conviction in 2022, where he was found 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 made significant strides in the workplace after sharing their experiences with everything from verbal harassment to sexual predation have been deeply affected by the ruling. The legal landscape for convictions of sexual assault has been challenged by the release of former comedian Bill Cosby, convicted of rape in 2018 and given a 10-year sentence, who was freed after just three years when the U.S. Supreme Court declined an appeal from a Pennsylvania court to overturn his conviction.
Once a formidable and influential figure in Hollywood, Weinstein is currently serving a sentence of over 160 miles (100 miles) in the Mohawk Correctional Facility in New York. His notable films include “Shakespeare in Love” and “Pulp Fiction.”