Harvey Weinstein Etienne Laurent-Pool/Getty Images
Harvey Weinstein‘s rape conviction from 2020 has been overturned.
The New York State Court of Appeals made the decision on Thursday, April 25, on the basis that the judge on the trial prejudiced Weinstein, 72, with “egregious” improper rulings, including a decision to let women testify about allegations that weren’t part of the case.
“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 decision stated, according to the Associated Press. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
The court’s majority claimed there was “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.”
While Hollywood may appear to be all glitz and glam on the surface, the industry has seen its fair share of scandals through the years. The New York Times and the New Yorker first published investigative pieces in 2017 that accused disgruntled movie producer Harvey Weinstein of decades of sexual assault and harassment. Soon after, Weinstein stood trial and was […]
Judge Madeline Singas, stated that the majority was “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative.” She also said the Court of Appeals was continuing a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”
The disgraced movie producer is currently serving a 23-year sentence in a New York prison after being convicted on charges of criminal sex act for forcibly performing oral sex and rape in the third degree. Weinstein will remain imprisoned because he was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 on other rape charges and sentenced to 16 years in prison. (He was acquitted in Los Angeles on charges involving one of the women who testified in New York.)
Story is developing.
