The decision of the New York Court of Appeal at the end of April 2024 had been experienced as a slap for the movement to combat sexual and sexist violence and taking into account the speech of the victims by justice.
The former king of the cinema Harvey Weinstein, whose fall led in 2017 the start of the world wave #MeToo, will be reached from Tuesday in New York for sexual assault and rape after the resounding cancellation of his conviction last year.
He hopes that the case will be “looked at with a new eye”
The former boss of Miramax, which reigned over independent cinema, will appear for the sexual assault of the former production assistant Mimi Haleyi, in 2006, the rape of the aspiring actress Jessica Mann, in 2013, and a new indictment for an alleged sexual assault in 2006 in a hotel in Manhattan.
The trial, scheduled to last up to six weeks before the Manhattan Criminal Court, begins Tuesday with the selection of the jury, which could be spread over five days according to judge Curtis Farber.
Harvey Weinstein, 73, hopes that the case will be “looked at with a new eye”, more than seven years after the surveys of the New York Times and New Yorker At the origin of his fall and a planetary shock wave which released many victims and forced societies to deep question on the place of women.
Also sentenced to sixteen years in prison in California for rape and sexual assault
Always detained – he was also sentenced to sixteen years in prison in 2023 in California for rape and sexual assault in 2013 on a European actress – the producer of countless cinema successes (“Sex Lies and Video”, “Pulp Fiction”, “Shakespeare in Love”) appeared in the last audiences reduced by the disease, bald, pale and pushed on a rolling chair.
“It will be very different,” wants to believe his lawyer Arthur Aidala, promising a trial “on the facts and not on #metoo”. “Five years ago, there were demonstrations, people who chanted” it’s a rapist “(…) People were so against him,” he added. “I think it all fell back,” he says.
Described by his accusers as a predator who played his all-powerful man’s stature from the cinema to obtain sexual favors of actresses or assistants, most often in hotel rooms, Harvey Weinstein has never recognized any assault and always assured that relations were granted.
Testimonials from victims should not have been heard according to the Court of Appeal
In 2020, the New York jury had recognized the guilty producer of two in five counts, the sexual assault by Mimi Haleyi and the rape of Jessica Mann. But the trial and the sentence of twenty-three years in prison were canceled in April 2024. In a very debated decision (four votes for, three against), the New York Court of Appeal judged that testimonies of victims on sexual assault for which Harvey Weinstein was not charged should not have been heard by the jurors at the trial.
Our file on the #MeToo movement
“It is really an illustration of the challenges that the victims must face in their quest for justice,” said Laura Palumbo, of the National Center for Resources on Sexual Violence. The three alleged victims should testify again in court.
