Former film producer Harvey Weinstein.
Credit: Reuters Photo
Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood mogul whose conviction for sex crimes in New York was overturned in April, is facing a new indictment, Manhattan prosecutors said in a hearing Thursday.
Weinstein, 72, was not in court Thursday morning. He was still in Bellevue Hospital, according to jail records, after being rushed from the Rikers Island jail complex for emergency heart surgery Monday morning.
The new indictment is still sealed and awaiting Weinstein’s recovery so he can be arraigned, prosecutors said.
The downfall of Weinstein, who was responsible for a long string of productions in Hollywood, including movies like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Chocolat,” helped ignite the global #MeToo movement. His conviction for sex crimes in New York was followed by another conviction and a sentence of 16 years in prison in a separate sex-crimes case in Los Angeles.
However, in April, in a 4-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in New York. The judges agreed with Weinstein’s lawyers that the trial judge had improperly allowed prosecutors to call several accusers as witnesses, even though their allegations had not led to charges. The decision had deprived Weinstein of a fair trial, they said.
Immediately after the decision, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said he would try to prosecute Weinstein again.
In the months since, prosecutors have said they have identified allegations of rape and sexual assault against Weinstein that they plan to present to a grand jury. According to the prosecutors, the events, some of which prosecutors knew of at the time of the first trial, occurred within the statute of limitations to bring charges.
In a hearing this month, prosecutors said they had alerted Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, that they had begun presenting to a grand jury in mid-August and gave some details about three new allegations of sexual assaults that Weinstein could be questioned about if he decided to testify before the panel.
Aidala said in court that the information Weinstein was given about the allegations was not enough to decide about going before the grand jury.
“I guess I could wheel Mr. Weinstein into the grand jury to say, ‘Look, I know I didn’t commit any crimes in this six-month period,’” Aidala said to the court. “They won’t tell me who the person is, I don’t know where it is, I have no idea of an age, no other information.”
The judge, Curtis Farber, asked prosecutors to give slightly more information.
According to the prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, one episode was a sexual assault at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. A second took place during the “winter season” of 2005-06 at a residential building in lower Manhattan, in either Tribeca or Soho, he said. A third sexual assault was described as occurring in May 2016 in a hotel in Tribeca.
In July, Farber set a tentative date of Nov. 12 for jury selection in a new sexual assault case against Weinstein.
At the height of his Hollywood power, Weinstein was viewed as a career-maker. According to his accusers, he also wielded that power to harass and sexually assault women for decades, many of whom were young and trying to establish themselves in the film industry.
He was indicted in 2018 in New York on charges of rape and committing a criminal sexual act. Prosecutors in Los Angeles charged him with raping one woman and groping and masturbating in front of a second in 2013.
In 2020, a New York jury convicted him of raping one woman and committing a criminal sex act against another. In Los Angeles, he was found guilty of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object.
Weinstein is appealing his Los Angeles conviction. In Britain, prosecutors recently dropped a case against Weinstein just two years after authorizing indecent assault charges against him.