For a few hours, Harvey Weinstein left the two spaces where he spends his days, prison and hospital, to go to the third place that has been more familiar to him in recent years: the courts. The 72-year-old film magnate, who was sentenced to two terms of 16 and 23 years in prison (the latter revoked in April; he remains in jail for the first), was charged on the 12th by the New York District Attorney’s Office with new charges of sexual abuse, without further details. Today, when the accusation was revealed, he went to the city court to plead not guilty.
The new accusation comes from a woman, so far anonymous, who accuses the all-powerful Hollywood producer of sexually abusing her in a hotel in Manhattan, New York, in 2006. When it became known that he was going to be charged with a new crime, less than a week ago, Weinstein was in a complicated health situation; in fact, that day he did not attend the hearing. On Monday the 9th he had to undergo emergency surgery for a heart problem, and his lawyers assured that he was in very serious condition, which led to fears for his life. He left the Rikers Island prison for the Bellevue hospital in Manhattan and, according to some American media, was in critical condition. For all this reason, the accusation was also delayed, which arrived this Wednesday.
“Thanks to this survivor, who bravely came forward, Harvey Weinstein is charged with yet another alleged violent sexual assault,” Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement.
This time, the man who was one of the most important film producers from the late eighties to the middle of the last decade – with titles such as Shakespeare in love, The King’s Speech either The Lord of the Rings in his briefcase—he did appear in court. He arrived in a wheelchair, dressed in a blue suit and tie with an American flag pin on his lapel and two books in his hands. The trial is tentatively scheduled for November 12.
The woman who is now accusing him dates the assault to 2006. It was in that same year that a television and film production assistant named Mimi Haleyi claimed that he forced her to perform oral sex. It was on that accusation, together with another from an actress, Jessica Mann, who accused him of raping her in 2013, that Weinstein was convicted. In March 2020, the New York State criminal court sentenced him to 23 years in prison. He had avoided life imprisonment, since in February, a few months earlier, the jury verdict had acquitted Weinstein of the three most serious charges of which he was accused.
The first criminal trial since the birth of the MeToo movement in the fall of 2017 suffered a major setback last April. Then, unexpectedly, the New York appeals court decided to overturn the 2020 conviction, saying the judge had harmed the former Hollywood producer with incorrect decisions, including allowing women to testify about allegations that were not part of the case, and that he should not have allowed “irrelevant” testimony during the trial. The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is also handling this new prosecution, will have to reactivate the process.
However, Weinstein remains in prison. In December 2022, he was convicted by a Los Angeles court on one count of rape and two counts of sexual harassment, for which he must serve another 16 years in prison, which was initially intended to be 24. In California, he was accused by eight women, all of them models and actresses, who accused him of sexual harassment and rape; however, the prosecution focused on four of them. One of them was Jennifer Siebel, wife of the current governor of the State, Gavin Newsom. In the end, the jury only found him guilty of three charges against one of the four women, a woman born in Russia but settled in Italy, whose identity was not revealed since he forced her to perform oral sex in Los Angeles in February 2013.
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