On Wednesday, Harvey Weinstein was convicted of a sex crime for a second time in the state of New York. He was found guilty on one of three charges, with the jury finding him liable for committing a first-degree criminal sexual act when he forced his former production assistant Mimi Haley into oral sex in his apartment in 2006.
Weinstein was acquitted on another sexual-assault charge involving Kaja Sokola, a former model who was not involved in the 2020 trial and claims Weinstein sexually assaulted her in 2006. Jurors reached no verdict on a third charge stemming from allegations made by Jessica Mann, an aspiring actress who has accused the disgraced media mogul of raping her in a Manhattan hotel in 2013. They’re expected to reconvene to discuss the third count on Thursday.
Weinstein was first charged by New York prosecutors in 2018, almost a year after more than a dozen women came forward with allegations of sexual harassment or assault. Since that first group, at least 100 women have come forward altogether with sexual-abuse allegations. In 2020, a New York jury found Weinstein guilty of one charge stemming from Mann’s allegation, and also found him guilty of sexually assaulting Haley. But in April 2024, New York’s highest court overturned his 23-year sentence, ruling that the trial judge had wrongly allowed testimony from accusers who were not part of the criminal case.
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Weinstein was also convicted by a Los Angeles court on one count of rape, one count of forced oral copulation, and one count of sexual misconduct back in 2022, and was sentenced to 16 years in prison. (He has since appealed that conviction, arguing that he did not receive a fair trial.) He has been serving his California sentence in the prison ward of Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, where he was moved when the New York conviction was overturned. Whatever sentencing comes out of this new conviction will happen once he’s completed the California sentence.
“Testifying in the face of constant disruptions, victim-shaming, and deliberate attempts to distort the truth was exhausting and, at times, dehumanizing,” Haley told the New York Times on Wednesday shortly after the conviction. “I’m so grateful to the jury. I hope it is finally over.”
