New York’s top appeals court has overturned a 2020 conviction for sex crimes against the once all-powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.
The film-maker will remain in jail because a separate 2022 conviction for rape from a Los Angeles court still stands. But this remains a notable victory for the man whose alleged offences triggered the #MeToo movement which, from 2017, revealed institutional sexual abuse at all levels of the Hollywood machine.
The actor Katherine Kendall, one of Weinstein’s accusers, was among several expressing dismay. “I’m completely let down by the justice system right now. I’m sort of flabbergasted,” she said. Amber Tamblyn, another actor at the heart of the #MeToo movement, described the ruling as “a loss to the entire community of women who put their lives and careers on the line to speak out”.
The 4-3 decision from the New York State Court of Appeals accused Justice James M Burke, the judge who presided over the case, of multiple unsatisfactory rulings, among them allowing women not directly involved in the relevant charges to testify.
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The text read: “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.” It went on to list the remedy as a “new trial”. Judge Madeline Singas, however, issued a fiery dissent to the decision. “Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women – especially the most vulnerable groups in society – will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” she wrote.
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Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years for forcing oral sex on a production assistant and for rape in the third degree of an actor. A retrial may still take place. Many close to the case were unsurprised at the developments.
Jodi Kantor, the New York Times reporter whose investigations were key to breaking the Weinstein story, wrote that “the criminal case against him has been fragile since the day it was filed”. Kantor further noted that “prosecutors moved it forward with risky, boundary-pushing bets”. She reported Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former Manhattan prosecutor, describing the quandary of whether Weinstein’s trial was fair as “a really close question that could have gone either way”.
There had long been rumours about Weinstein, the New York-born co-founder of Miramax Films, but it was not until October of 2017 that stories in the New York Times and the New Yorker put dozens of accusations relating to sexual assault in black and white. More than 80 women ended up stepping forward.
The scandal won those two periodicals the Pulitzer Prize – Zoe Kazan played Kantor in She Said, a 2022 film on the Times’ investigations – and triggered an upheaval whose aftershocks have not yet fully died away. A year later, the New York Times reported that, of 201 men who had lost their jobs following accusations of sexual harassment, close to half were replaced by women.
In May 2018, Weinstein was arrested in New York and was found guilty two years later. In 2022, the Los Angeles court found him guilty of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel.
Since the first trial, Weinstein, who has diabetes, eye complaints and heart disease, has been held in “semi-protective custody” at a facility near Syracuse in New York State. It is understood he will now be moved to California to continue serving time on the conviction in that jurisdiction.
A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney declared her office’s determination to get him back before a New York judge. “We will do everything in our power to retry this case and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault,” she said.
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