The film producer Harvey Weinstein whose history of sexual abuse and rape sparked the #MeToo movement must be retried for the sexual assaults against three women for which he was sentenced to 23 years in prison in February 2020. This has been decided by the New York Court of Appeals. , the highest judicial body in that state, after determining that the trial that Weinstein had had had had irregularities. The sentence does not affect another sentence, of 16 years, that Weinstein – co-producer of, among other films, ‘Forrest Gump’ and ‘Shakespeare in Love’ – is serving after being convicted, also of rape, by a Los Angeles court. .
The ruling has been very tight. Four judges voted in favor and three against. And the fact that three of them were women has given an additional ‘morbid’ to an appeal loaded with symbolism and emotions. And precisely because symbolism and emotions were allowed to enter the trial against Weinstein is why the process will have to be repeated. The main argument of the sentence is that the judge James Burke who led the trial, made a basic error by allowing six women to testify who claimed to have been previously sexually assaulted by the film producer, but whose cases were not being tried. In other words: Weinstein was on trial for assaulting three women, but a total of nine were allowed to be charged.
“Under our system of Justice, the accused has the right to be considered responsible only for the crime for which he has been charged and, therefore, allegations of previous acts with the sole objective of establishing his propensity to commit crime will not be admitted,” declares the sentence, signed by the judge who is a member of the Democratic Party – the one who embraced the #MeToo movement – Jenny Rivera. Thus, “testimonies of alleged sexual acts perpetrated against people who are not the complainants” were accepted.
But the irregularities go much further, when, as Rivera recalled, in the trial Weinstein was allowed to be questioned about those other alleged sexual abuses that were not part of the case, while those women also had the right to testify in the process. . So, a kind of double judgment was formed. On the one hand, the procedures were typical of a series of cases of rape or sexual assault on several women, despite the fact that only the attacks on three of them were being prosecuted. All of this “presented the accused in a highly damaging light. The synergy effect of all these efforts was not harmless,” Rivera concluded.
The New York trial against Weinstein was, to a large extent, the #MeToo trial. It concluded with the businessman – one of the most influential in the global film industry – convicted of two of the five charges against him: rape and sexual assault in the first degree. The sentence was ratified in the first appeal, in 2022. Weinstein has been accused of sexually attacking more than one hundred women, many of them stars of Hollywood or the world of fashion. The relevance of his name and his proximity to the Democratic Party caused this behavior to trigger a worldwide feminist movement known as the #MeToo. A large part of his relevance at a social level was due to the reports about his attacks published in the newspaper ‘The New York Times’ and in the weekly ‘The New Yorker’.
Weinstein’s defense has always argued that His penalties would have been much less if he had been a person with a lower social profile. An example of this is the trial that must now be repeated, given that the prosecutor asked for life imprisonment, something extremely unusual in sexual crimes that do not involve recidivism.
