Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction was overturned by the New York Appeals Court on Thursday.
The disgraced Hollywood mogul was convicted of sexual assault and rape in 2020 during the height of the #MeToo movement.
Weinstein was also found guilty of rape in a Los Angeles sexual assault trial in 2022.
New York’s high court overturned the conviction and said the remedy is a new trial.
“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 4-3 decision said, according to AP. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
The AP reported:
New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction, finding the judge at the landmark #MeToo trial prejudiced the ex-movie mogul with “egregious” improper rulings, including a decision to let women testify about allegations that weren’t part of the case.
The court’s majority said “it is 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.”
In a stinging dissent, Judge Madeline Singas wrote that the majority was “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative,” and said the Court of Appeals was continuing a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”
“The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Singas wrote.
DEVELOPING…
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