Names and faces
■ Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison Thursday after he was found guilty in Los Angeles in December of rape, forced oral copulation and sexual misconduct. Those years will be added on to a 23-year sentence the once-powerful film producer is already serving in a New York state prison, all but ensuring Weinstein will spend the rest of his life behind bars. The Los Angeles case stems from one survivor. Referred to in court as Jane Doe 1, the woman accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her at a Beverly Hills hotel after a film festival in 2013. Three other women also accused the now-70-year-old Weinstein of misconduct during the Los Angeles trial. Weinstein was acquitted on one of those charges and the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision on the additional counts involving two other women. Weinstein’s reckoning began in 2017, after watershed investigations into his decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct were published by The New York Times and the New Yorker. Those explosive reports, which helped ignite the #MeToo movement, led to criminal investigations in several major cities. Weinstein, who has maintained his innocence since the allegations were first made public, was eventually charged in New York and Los Angeles on several counts of rape and sexual abuse. He is appealing his 2020 conviction in New York.
■ A federal judge on Thursday sentenced R. Kelly to 20 years in prison for child sex crimes, after a jury found that he had produced three videos of himself sexually abusing his 14-year-old goddaughter. In a victory for the defense, the judge ruled that all but one year of the prison sentence would be served at the same time as a previous 30-year sentence that Kelly received after a jury in Brooklyn, N.Y., convicted him of racketeering and sex trafficking charges. The jury in Chicago convicted Kelly, 56, of six of the 13 charges brought against him, including three counts of coercing minors into sexual activity and three of producing sex tapes involving a minor. He was acquitted of a charge that he had attempted to obstruct an earlier investigation into his abuse of the goddaughter, and two other counts of enticing minors to have sex. Federal prosecutors had argued that Kelly deserved 25 years in prison on top of his earlier sentence, citing the singer’s “lack of remorse” as a reason he would pose a danger to society if released. “The only way to ensure he will not reoffend is to impose a sentence that will keep him in prison for the rest of his life,” Jeannice Williams Appenteng, one of the prosecutors, said in court Thursday. A lawyer for Kelly, Jennifer Bonjean, argued that her client was “likely to die in prison either way,” but that if he did not, he would not pose a threat in old age. She is appealing the convictions in both Chicago and New York.