Good morning from Hell, where the New York Court of Appeals has overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction.
This morning, New York’s highest court (that’s for damn sure) overturned Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for raping two women in New York, citing “prejudicial” testimony from prior victims. “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 said in a 4-3 decision presumably accompanied by a cacophony of clown horns. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
Weinstein leveraged his status as one of Hollywood’s most powerful film producers to prey on women for decades. More than 100 women accused Weinstein of sexual abuse and rape, the details of which became public in the fall of 2017 and helped kick off the resurgence of the #MeToo movement. In 2020, a Manhattan jury found Weinstein guilty of committing criminal sexual assault in the first degree and rape in the third degree and sentenced him to 23 years in prison. According to the Court of Appeals, the judge who presided over the trial, Justice James M. Burke, should not have allowed testimony from Weinstein’s previous victims because their allegations were not formally included in the charges against him.
In its majority opinion, the court heinously described the acts of sexual assault detailed by Weinstein’s victims as “nothing more than bad behavior”:
… 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.
Although their allegations were not part of the charges against Weinstein in the 2020 case, the women were permitted to testify as “Molineux witnesses” in an effort to demonstrate Weinstein’s history of predatory behavior. In her dissent, Judge Madeline Singas said that the court was “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative.” Singas called out the court’s “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence,” adding, “The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability.”
According to The New York Times, the Manhattan district attorney’s office will seek a retrial. “We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault,” a spokesman said.
Weinstein will not be released from prison and will instead be remanded to California, where he was convicted of rape in 2022 and sentenced to serve 16 years in prison. It’s a small measure of comfort following New York’s egregious ruling, which only underlines what so many women and survivors of sexual assault in this country know in our bones to be true: this country does not care about us.
(featured image: Etienne Laurent-Pool, Getty Images)
