Harvey Weinstein appeared on Wednesday afternoon in a New York City courthouse, where a prosecutor told the judge that the disgraced Hollywood producer could face a new indictment ahead of his scheduled retrial on sex crime charges.
During the court hearing, Assistant District Attorney Nicole Blumberg said that new accusers have come forward with sexual misconduct claims against the once-influential movie producer, and that prosecutors are working to determine whether the new claims fall under the statute of limitations.
“People who couldn’t speak out in 2020 are now willing to speak out in 2024,” Ms. Blumberg told Judge Curtis Farber.
Mr. Weinstein, 72, was briefly hospitalized last month upon his return to New York City after the state’s highest court overturned his 2020 convictions on rape and sexual assault charges. On Wednesday, he entered the Manhattan courtroom in a wheelchair, as he has during other recent court appearances.
The next court appearance for Mr. Weinstein is scheduled for July 9. His retrial on sex crime charges is tentatively scheduled for some time after Labor Day.
At his 2020 trial, the Academy Award-winning film producer was convicted of rape in the third degree for an attack on former actress Jessica Mann in 2013, and of sexually assaulting Miriam Haley, a former TV and film production assistant, in 2016. He was later sentenced to 23 years in prison, which he was serving at the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome in central New York.
In a 4-3 decision on April 25, New York State Court of Appeal threw out those convictions, after determining that the trial judge improperly allowed testimony against Mr. Weinstein based on allegations from other women who weren’t part of the case.
In its majority opinion, the state appeals court said it was a series of “egregious errors” to allow several uncharged allegations to be brought up during Mr. Weinstein’s trial. The opinion further pointed out that the Manhattan district attorney unfairly brought forth evidence such as that Mr. Weinstein allegedly threatened violence against people who worked for him, that he allegedly abandoned a colleague by the side of the road in a foreign country, or that members of his staff allegedly photoshopped a female actor’s head on another woman’s nude body.
Such allegations of misconduct, according to the appeals court, were “irrelevant, prejudicial, and untested,” and helped portray Mr. Weinstein in a “highly prejudicial light.”
“The synergistic effect of these errors was not harmless,” read the lengthy opinion. “The threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined [the] defendant’s right to testify. The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
While his retrial proceeds, Mr. Weinstein will remain imprisoned because he received in 2022 a 16-year sentence in Los Angeles, where a jury found him guilty over rape allegations brought by a woman only identified as Jane Doe 1. Following the overturn of the Manhattan guilty verdict, Ms. Doe is now the only accuser to obtain a criminal conviction against him.
California authorities have asked that Mr. Weinstein be brought back to the Golden State to start serving his sentence there in advance of his new Manhattan trial, a request Mr. Weinstein’s legal team has fiercely opposed.
“They are not in a position to extradite Mr. Weinstein right now because they have not done what they needed to do,” Diana Fabi Samson, one of Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers, said after a May. 9 extradition hearing in Queens.
“He’s not a fugitive in the colloquial sense of the word. That’s just the language they use,” the attorney said. “Our main concern is that Mr. Weinstein is here in New York so that we can prepare for the trial.”
Mr. Weinstein has denied any wrongdoing in either New York or California. His legal team is working to appeal the California case.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
From The Epoch Times