Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges was overturned by New York’s highest court on Thursday, when the New York Court of Appeals found in a 4-3 decision that the trial judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case had made a mistake in allowing prosecutors to call as witnesses women who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him. The four judges in the majority wrote that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior, and determined he had not had a fair trial, the New York Times reports. Weinstein, as a movie producer, had been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, and his conviction was a foundational case of the #MeToo era.
Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg — already in the midst of a trial against former President Donald J. Trump — will have to decide whether to seek a retrial of Weinstein. Regardless, Weinstein, 71, will remain locked up. In 2022, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison in California after he was convicted of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel. Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 100 women; in New York he was convicted of assaulting two of them. “This is a shocking and disheartening day for survivors of sexual assault,” said Jane Manning, the director of the Women’s Equal Justice project and a former sex crimes prosecutor. “This just shows how much more work we all have to do, to bring the ideals of the #MeToo movement forward.” Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said that the decision was “not just a victory for Mr. Weinstein, but for every criminal defendant in the state of New York, and we compliment the Court of Appeals for upholding the most basic principles that a criminal defendant should have in a trial.”