Harvey Weinstein’s Rape Conviction Overturned by New York Appeals Court

Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction in a landmark #MeToo trial was overturned Thursday by the New York State Court of Appeals.

According to the Associated Press, the court ruled in a 4-3 decision that Judge James Burke, who presided over the trial, made “egregious” improper rulings against Weinstein during the proceedings, including the admission of women’s testimonies that were unrelated to the trial’s specific charges.

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“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,” read the court’s decision. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

The disgraced Hollywood mogul was initially found guilty in February 2020 of a criminal sexual act in the first degree (against former production assistant Miriam Haley, in 2006) and rape in the third degree (against aspiring actress Jessica Mann, in 2013). He had been acquitted, however, of the two most serious charges against him, for predatory sexual assault.

Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison at the time. Despite the overturning of his New York trial verdict, Weinstein will remain in prison at the state’s Mohawk Correctional Facility, as he had also been convicted on three charges of rape and sexual assault in a separate Los Angeles trial in December 2022. That trial resulted in a 16-year prison sentence.

A New Yorker exposé published in October 2017, in which 13 women alleged that Weinstein had sexually harassed or assaulted them over the years, was the impetus for his downfall. The fallout for Weinstein was immediate after the article’s publication, ranging from scrapped Hollywood projects to expulsion from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the allegations against him became a cornerstone of the Me Too movement.

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