According to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Harvey Weinstein will appear in a New York City court on May 1, 2024. File
| Photo Credit: AP

Disgraced Hollywood movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was hospitalised on April 27 upon his return to New York after the city’s highest court overturned his 2020 conviction on sex crime charges.

The 4-3 decision was a shock reversal of one of the defining cases of the #MeToo movement, but Weinstein will remain jailed on a separate 16-year rape sentence handed down in California.

Also Read | A look at past and future cases Harvey Weinstein has faced as his New York conviction is thrown out

“The NYC Department of Corrections determined that Weinstein needed immediate medical attention,” his lawyer Arthur L Aidala told AFP in a statement.

“A myriad of tests are being performed on Harvey and he is being kept for observation.”

Police told U.S. media that Weinstein had been taken to New York’s Bellevue Hospital.

On Thursday, the city’s Court of Appeals found the trial judge erred in admitting the testimony of additional women who were allegedly abused by Weinstein but who were not named in the charges brought against him, and ordered a new trial.

Bombshell allegations broke against the Oscar-winning producer in 2017, launching the #MeToo movement that paved the way for women to fight back against sexual violence in the workplace.

Weinstein, 72, was convicted in a New York court in 2020 of the rape and sexual assault of ex-actress Jessica Mann in 2013, and of forcibly performing oral sex on former production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006.

He was later sentenced to 23 years in prison.

New York:

Thursday’s ruling overturning Harvey Weinstein’s New York rape conviction gives the one-time film mogul a chance at a new trial and calls into question what evidence prosecutors can use in future sex crime cases.

Here is a look at what happened to the case, which helped define the #MeToo movement, and what might happen next.

WHY WAS WEINSTEIN’S CONVICTION OVERTURNED?

Weinstein, 72, was found guilty of raping one woman and sexually assaulting another after both testified in court.

But a 4-3 majority of the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, found that the trial judge should not have permitted three other women to testify that Weinstein had assaulted them as well because their allegations were not part of the criminal charges against him.

Such testimony about “prior bad acts” is usually barred by New York’s so-called Molineux rule, named for a landmark 1901 court case. The majority of the court found that the testimony by the three women ran afoul of the rule and made the trial unfair.

WHY WERE THE OTHER WOMEN ALLOWED TO TESTIFY IN THE FIRST PLACE?

The Molineux rule is not absolute. It holds that prosecutors cannot use such testimony to prove that the defendant has a “propensity” to commit crime, but they may use it as evidence of motive or intent.

In Weinstein’s case, prosecutors persuaded the trial judge that the producer’s alleged prior sexual assaults showed that he knew his accusers did not consent to his advances, but that he intended to force them into sex anyway.

Prosecutors believed the evidence would help disprove Weinstein’s assertion that the encounters were consensual.

The Court of Appeals, however, found that the testimony was simply evidence that he had a propensity to commit rape and sexual assault, not of his motive or intent.

WHAT DOES THE RULING MEAN FOR WEINSTEIN’S CALIFORNIA CASE?

Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison following a separate 2022 rape conviction in California, which he is expected to appeal, and the New York ruling has no direct effect on that case.

In fact, California law specifically allows testimony about prior bad acts in sex crime cases as evidence that a defendant has a propensity to commit sex crimes. Such evidence was used in Weinstein’s California trial, and the state’s law will make it harder for his lawyers to challenge on appeal than in New York.

WHAT DOES THE RULING MEAN FOR FUTURE CASES IN NEW YORK?

According to the majority of the court, very little. Judge Jenny Rivera wrote in the majority opinion that the decision was based on well-established New York law, and said it was similar to another 1996 Court of Appeals decision, People v. Vargas, vacating a rape conviction because witnesses were allowed to testify about earlier alleged rapes by the defendant.

Dissenting judges in Thursday’s decision said the ruling would make it more difficult to prosecute sex crimes committed by people who know their victims and may have ongoing relationships with them, as in Weinstein’s case.

Judge Anthony Cannataro, who was among the dissenters, called it “an unfortunate step backwards from recent advances in our understanding of how sex crimes are perpetrated.”

Another dissenting judge, Madeline Singas, said the decision would effectively end the use of prior bad acts witnesses in such cases and make it difficult to prove intent.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)