WEINSTEIN GUILTY OF RAPE, SEX ASSAULT
Ex-mogul sent straight to jail; appeal planned
Harvey Weinstein is facing decades in prison after he was convicted Monday of raping and sexually assaulting two women, sealing his descent from the most powerful man in Hollywood to archvillain of the #MeToo movement.
Weinstein, 67, looked resigned as the verdict was read, convicting him of committing a criminal sexual act in 2006, a crime that carries a sentence of five to 25 years in prison, and a 2013 third-degree rape, for which he could be sentenced to up to four years.
Judge James Burke ordered Weinstein to jail immediately, and he was handcuffed by court officers and led from the Manhattan courtroom.
Although the jury found him not guilty of first-degree rape and two counts
of the most serious charge, predatory sexual assault, which could have resulted in a life sentence, victims’ advocates said the verdict sends a crucial message that even the most powerful can be held to account.
“We still have a lot of work to do for survivors to be heard and believed, but this does put on notice abusers and the powerful systems that collude to protect them,” said Debra Robbin, executive director of Jane Doe Inc., the Massachusetts Coalition Against Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence. “It wasn’t only him; it was the whole system protecting him. And today, that got dismantled a little bit.”
Weinstein’s lawyers said they will appeal.
The case against the once-feared producer essentially was built on three allegations: that he raped an aspiring actress in a New York City hotel room in 2013, that he forcibly performed oral sex on production assistant Mimi Haleyi and that he raped and forcibly performed oral sex on “Sopranos” actress Annabella Sciorra in the mid-1990s.
The Boston Herald does not identify sex crime victims unless they agree go public with their accusations, as both Haleyi and Sciorra did.
The verdict, which the jury of seven men and five women took five days to reach, was seen as a longoverdue reckoning after years of whispers about Weinstein’s behavior turned into a torrent of accusations in 2017 that destroyed his career and helped give rise to #MeToo, the global movement to encourage women to come forward and hold men accountable for their sexual misconduct.
Although Weinstein did not testify, his attorney, Donna Rotunno, argued that he had become “the target of a cause and a movement” and that the case against him amounted to “regret renamed as rape” by women who had exercised their free will to try to further their careers.
But prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon told the jury that Weinstein considered himself such a big shot in Hollywood that he thought he could get away with treating women as “complete disposables.”
The phenomenally successful movie executive helped bring to the screen such Oscar winners as “Pulp Fiction,” “Good Will Hunting,” “Shakespeare in Love” and “The King’s Speech” and nurtured the careers of celebrated filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith.
Weinstein now faces charges in Los Angeles, where authorities allege that he raped one woman and sexually assaulted another during Oscars week in 2013.