Harvey Weinstein, the fallen Hollywood executive whose decades-long history of alleged sexual assault sparked the #MeToo movement and calls against workplace harassment across entertainment and beyond, was found guilty of one 2006 sexual assault but acquitted on another from the same year in the high-profile retrial of his sex crimes case in New York.
The majority-female jury handed down its split verdict after a week of deliberation. Weinstein was convicted in February 2020 of rape and a felony sex crime connected to individual allegations from accusers Jessica Mann and Mimi Haley, respectively. He was acquitted at the time on two charges of predatory sexual assault. A month later, he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.
A New York appeals court overturned Weinstein’s rape conviction in April 2024.
On Wednesday, he was convicted of forcing oral sex on Haley and acquitted of the same regarding former model Kaja Sokola. The jury was hung on a third charge of raping Mann in 2013, the Associated Press reported.
In closing arguments, which concluded June 4, Weinstein’s defense attorney Arthur L. Aidala downplayed his client’s alleged assaults as part of a “courting game” and said they were “transactional” exchanges of favors. According to Aidala, prosecutors were “trying to police the bedroom.”
Weinstein had become “the poster boy, the original sinner, for the #MeToo movement,” he added.
Prosecutor Nicole Blumberg took a different tone, throwing Aidala’s phrases back at the defense: “This was not a ‘courting game,’ as Mr. Aidala wants you to believe. This was not a ‘transaction.” “This was never about ‘fooling around.’ It was about rape,” she said.
Weinstein’s retrial began April 23 and featured emotional testimony from former Weinstein Co. production assistant Haley and once-aspiring actor Mann, who returned to the stand, plus Sokola, who did not testify against the mogul in the 2020 trial. Judge Curtis Farber oversaw the proceedings. The disgraced Hollywood boss, 73, was tried on the allegations that led to his original rape and felony sex act conviction, plus a new sexual assault charge stemming from Sokola’s allegation that he forced oral sex on her in 2006 when she was 19. Weinstein pleaded not guilty to all those charges and his defense maintained the alleged sexual encounters were consensual.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Resources for survivors of sexual assault
If you or someone you know is the victim of sexual violence, you can find support using RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline. Call (800) 656-HOPE or visit online.rainn.org to speak with a trained support specialist.
