Harvey faces life in prison
Harvey Weinstein was hit with additional sex-crime charges — stemming from an assault allegation by a new, third accuser — that could send him to prison for life, authorities announced Monday.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. got the new indictment based on a complaint by production assistant Mimi Haleyi, who accused the film mogul of a 2006 forcible sexual act, sources said.
On Friday, she became the third accuser to testify before a Manhattan grand jury in the Weinstein case, establishing an alleged pattern of criminal sexual assault that allowed the DA to add two counts of predatory sexual assault to his rap sheet.
The new charges — some of the most serious under New York’s penal code — mean Weinstein now faces a minimum of 10 years and up to life behind bars if convicted, according to Vance.
Weinstein had been looking at up to 25 years on felony charges of rape and a criminal sex act, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Vance’s office wouldn’t identify the new accuser, but Haley i is the only woman who has made a complaint to the NYPD about the former Miramax head committing a forcible sex act in 2006, law-enforcement t sources told The Post.
And Haley ialeyi has said pub-publicly thatt Weinstein in-invited herr to his Soho family home ome that year, when shee was in her 20s — thenhen allegedly held her down on one of his children’s il dren’s beds, pulled out ut her tampon and performed ormed oral sex on her whilehile she begged him to stop.op.
“He held eld me down on the bed. I tried to get him off me and kept asking him to stop, but it was impossible,” she said at a press conference in October. Her lawyer, Gloria Allred, said she had no comment Monday on whether Haley i was the alleged victim in the new indictment. Weinstein will be arraigned on the new indictment on July 9. His lawyer says he will plead not g guilty y again. g “Mr. Weinste Weinstein maintains that all of these thes allegations are false, and he expects to be fully vindicated.vin Furthermore, more, to charge Mr. Weinst Weinstein as a predator when the interactions were eache consensual is simply not justified,” the attorney, at Ben Brafman, man, sasaid in a statement. The eearlier charges in Weinstein W einstein’ s case stem from al leg at io allegations that he forced asp aspiring actress Lu- cia Evans to perform oral sex on him in 2004 and raped a second woman at a DoubleTree hotel in Manhattan in 2013.
Brafman has said Weinstein had a decade-long sexual relationship with the second woman, who was not identified, “both before the alleged incident and after the alleged incident.”
Evans told The New Yorker magazine that she was a college student when she met Weinstein in a nightclub and he offered to introduce her to a casting executive.
They met alone at his Miramax office in Tribeca, where he told her she would “be great” for the reality-TV show “Project Runway” if she lost weight — then whipped out his penis and forced her onto it, Evans alleged in the magazine.
Weinstein, who has denied ever forcing any woman into sex, is out on $1 million bail.