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1 week ago
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New York’s highest court has overturned the 2020 rape conviction against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, ruling that the judge in the trial made “egregious” improper rulings.
“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the court’s 4-3 decision said, according to The Associated Press. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”
Judge Madeline Singas was one of three dissents in the ruling, charging that the majority was “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative.” The court, she said, was continuing a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”
Weinstein, 72, was convicted on charges relating to forcing oral sex on a production assistant in 2006 and raping an aspiring actress in 2013. He has been serving a 23 year sentence in New York. But he won’t be released because a Los Angeles jury convicted him in 2022 of another rape, and he was sentenced to 16 years in prison, as CrimeOnline reported.
Weinstein has maintained that all his aggressive sexual acts were consensual despite the wide disparity between his position and that of the women.
The judge who oversaw the case, James Burke, was not reappointed to the bench when his term expired in 2022.
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[Featured image: Harvey Weinstein arrives at a Manhattan courthouse for his rape trial, Monday, Feb. 24, 2020, in New York. A jury convicted the Hollywood mogul of rape and sexual assault. The jury found him not guilty of the most serious charge, predatory sexual assault, which could have resulted in a life sentence.(AP Photo/John Minchillo)]
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