The conviction of former film producer Harvey Weinstein to twenty-three years in prison for rape was overturned on Thursday April 25, on appeal, by the highest New York judicial body which ordered a new trial. This collegial decision was taken by four judges against three. Mr. Weinstein, now 72, has been accused of rape and sexual assault by more than a hundred women.
The revelations about his behavior in October 2017, by the New York Times and the New Yorker, had sparked the global #metoo movement. In the short term, the producer remains in a New York prison because he is serving a second sentence of sixteen years in prison, handed down in 2023 in Los Angeles, for having raped an actress in a Beverly Hills hotel in 2013. Nevertheless, the New York decision has the effect of a bomb.
The producer was sentenced in 2020 to twenty-three years in prison by New York judge James Burke. The jurors found him guilty of inflicting cunnilingus, using violence, on production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006 (“sexual assault in the first degree”, punishable by five to twenty-five years in prison). and guilty of rape without use of force in 2013 (“third-degree rape”, maximum four years in prison) against Jessica Mann, who dreamed of being an actress.
But, and this is the problem, during this trial, the jurors heard additional testimony from three other women who had suffered attacks from Harvey Weinstein. They were not part of the formal complaint, but their testimony of immorality was supposed to overwhelm Mr. Weinstein, which it did.
“Egregious errors”
The first, met in a nightclub in Manhattan in the mid-2000s: Mr. Weinstein tried to put his hand in her vagina and offered her a contract in the cinema in exchange for sex. The second was serving cocktails in a Manhattan bar: he invited her to his room in 2005 before throwing her on his bed and having sex while she was petrified. The third was met in Los Angeles in 2013 and Mr. Weinstein masturbated in front of her even though he managed to lure her into the bathroom.
For Judge Jenny Rivera, who wrote the decision on behalf of the four majority judges, this way of doing things “destroys reputation” of Mr. Weinstein and influenced the debates without providing any“ light on criminal charges » precise details of the trial, while criminal law is strict.
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