The women who came forward against Harvey Weinstein reacted with fury after the disgraced media mogul’s rape and sexual assault convictions were overturned by a New York appeals court on Thursday.
Weinstein, 72, was found guilty in 2020 of raping and assaulting two women, and is serving his 23-year sentence at a prison in upstate New York.
In a 4-3 decision on Thursday, New York’s highest court ruled the original judge made “egregious errors” in the trial by allowing prosecutors to call witnesses whose allegations were not related to the charges at hand.
Weinstein was once one of Hollywood’s most well-connected and powerful producers who made a series of Oscar-winning films. But behind the glamourous facade, it was a different story. More than 80 women have accused him of abuse ranging from groping to rape. Even with his conviction overturned in New York, he remains convicted of rape in California.
The Weinstein revelations launched the #MeToo movement in 2017, which saw women from all corners of society come forward to talk about their experiences of sexual harassment and assault.
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Supposedly, it’s because a lot of the witnesses were also claiming to be victims, but also had never reported the attacks. It’s important to remember that his trial basically started the #MeToo movement, and his defense has basically managed to leverage that to go “these other witnesses weren’t relevant, because he was only on trial for the two rapes.”
Basically, imagine you’re on trial for a robbery you never committed. You’re a serial robber, but none of your victims have ever come forward. Then for this one particular robbery case (which you didn’t do) the floodgates open and all of your previous victims start popping up to go “oh yeah he definitely robbed me but I never reported it.” Again, you didn’t commit this specific robbery, and your previous robberies shouldn’t factor into your conviction on this case because you didn’t do it this time. It would be a miscarriage of justice to allow those previous victims to influence your current case.
If those victims wanted you convicted for their robberies, they’d need to come forward and accuse you of it for their specific case. But that isn’t what happened; They just attached themselves to an entirely separate robbery case, for robberies you had never been convicted of in the past.
To be clear: I 100% believe he did it. But this is how the courts are looking at his case. Instead of facing 80 separate charges, he faced 2 charges with 80 unrelated witnesses.
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Listen to NYT The Daily’s for a good breakdown of the prosecutor’s gamble that lead to the overturning.
Apparently it’s a quirk of NY law that’s rarely used because this can happen.