Harvey Weinstein, Facing New Charge, Returns to Court in New York

The disgraced Hollywood producer will face a new trial for sex crimes in New York after a previous conviction was reversed last year.

Five years after Harvey Weinstein’s New York trial for sex crimes, a watershed moment in the #MeToo era, the disgraced Hollywood mogul will be back in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday for the start of a new trial.

Mr. Weinstein, 73, was convicted in 2020 of rape and criminal sexual act, while the jury acquitted him on three other charges, including accusations that he was a sexual predator. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

The state’s highest court overturned that conviction last April in a fiercely contested 4-3 decision that reverberated through the country as much as the guilty verdict had years before. In their ruling, the judges said that Mr. Weinstein had been deprived of a fair trial when prosecutors were allowed to call witnesses who said he had assaulted them, but whose accusations were not backed by physical evidence and were not the basis for any of the charges against him. The court ordered a new trial.

For many in the legal world, the decision was not shocking — the case against Mr. Weinstein was seen as having tested the limits of New York’s laws. But for victims of sexual assault and advocates who support them, the overturning of his conviction was seen as a setback and stirred fresh doubts about the legal system’s ability to hold influential people to account. And in the years since Mr. Weinstein was originally found guilty, broader worries have grown that the effects of the #MeToo movement on the nation’s culture and politics, from Hollywood to the White House, have faded.

The new trial offers the Manhattan district attorney’s office a chance to reprosecute a person who at one time appeared untouchable, and in a kind of case that was rarely pursued in the past.

Mr. Weinstein has also been convicted in California on sex-crime charges and faces a prison term there. He is appealing the California conviction.

“I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” he said in a statement on Monday. “Tomorrow, I walk into court a free man in New York — and I expect to walk out the same way.”

Immediately after the appeals court’s decision, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that he would prosecute Mr. Weinstein again (the earlier case had been tried by Mr. Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.). Since then, the office has added a new sex-crime indictment against Mr. Weinstein.

Mr. Weinstein is again being tried on charges of first-degree criminal sexual act and third-degree rape based on complaints by a former television production assistant, Miriam Haley, and an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann. Both women testified in the 2020 trial and are expected to do so again.

He is newly charged with sexually assaulting an unidentified woman in a Manhattan hotel in 2006. Prosecutors told the court that the new complainant is someone they have known of since 2020, but who was only now ready to come forward.

Mr. Weinstein has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex. On Tuesday, prosecutors and Mr. Weinstein’s defense team will begin choosing the second jury to decide his fate, a process estimated to take about five days.

The story of Mr. Weinstein’s fall from the heights of the moviemaking world has captivated Americans for nearly a decade. But the stories of his alleged abuses reach back much further.

While he rose in prominence as a Hollywood producer, collecting accolades for movies like “Pulp Fiction” and “Shakespeare In Love,” he also wielded the power to harass and sexually assault women, according to dozens of women who came forward. Many of them were young and trying to make it in the industry, they said. An investigation by The New York Times found that Mr. Weinstein had paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades.

Sex crimes as a whole remain overwhelmingly underreported. When people do pursue charges, the cases can be difficult to prosecute, often because the perpetrators are known to the victims and their relationships can be complicated. For every 1,000 sexual assaults, about 28 people are convicted of a felony, according to an analysis by RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

Mr. Weinstein’s earlier case was not the first time Manhattan prosecutors had investigated reports of sexual crimes by the former producer. But the legal case against Mr. Weinstein has faced challenges.

In 2015, Mr. Vance, then the district attorney, declined to prosecute Mr. Weinstein, saying his office did not have enough evidence, despite an audio tape an Italian model made for the police in which the producer apologized when she asked him why he had touched her breasts.

Feeling public pressure, Mr. Vance’s office pushed forward a case against Mr. Weinstein in 2018, that by the time it reached trial was built primarily around the accusations of three complaining witnesses. Two of the women — Ms. Haley and Ms. Mann — had admitted to having friendly communication with Mr. Weinstein after their alleged attacks, including agreeing to have sex with him, a point his defense team used to try to dismiss the charges.

To bolster the prosecution’s case, three other women were permitted to testify as Molineux witnesses, which means they were called to show a defendant’s pattern of behavior.

The case turned solely on whether a jury would believe the women’s testimony. Prosecutors did not have any physical evidence to support the women’s accounts. In addition, the trial judge, James M. Burke, ruled that if Mr. Weinstein took the stand, prosecutors could ask him about the allegations by the additional witnesses.

Justice Burke’s rulings on these points were “not harmless,” hampering Mr. Weinstein’s ability to defend himself, the state’s highest court later said.

“The result of the court’s rulings, on the one hand, was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant’s character before the jury,” the judges wrote. “On the other hand, the threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant’s right to testify.”

In the new trial, no one will testify solely as a Molineux witness. And if Mr. Weinstein decides to take the stand, prosecutors will be more limited in what they can ask him — for example, prosecutors can ask whether he was convicted on any felony charges in California, but they cannot ask him about the underlying facts of that case or what the charges were.

Outside of the legal developments playing out in Manhattan criminal court, Mr. Weinstein’s health has been declining for years. He has diabetes, and his lawyer, Arthur L. Aidala, has said he has “fluid on his heart, fluid in his lungs” and spinal stenosis, among other ailments. In September, Mr. Weinstein was hospitalized for emergency heart surgery. The next month, he was diagnosed with cancer.

He is being held at the Rikers Island jail complex, which Mr. Weinstein and his lawyers have said compounds his health problems. In November, he filed a notice of claim against New York City and its Department of Correction for “egregious harm,” medical negligence and malpractice. Among his complaints were accusations that the medical staff mismanaged his white blood cell counts and failed to adequately manage his thyroid condition.

Mr. Weinstein voiced his concerns about awaiting trial at Rikers in a minutes-long request he made to Curtis Farber, the judge overseeing his current trial, in a January hearing. He requested that Justice Farber move up his trial date, telling the judge he “can’t hold on anymore.” Rikers, he said, is a “hellhole” and a “stain on the city.”

“I’m holding on because I want justice for myself and I want this to be over,” Mr. Weinstein told the judge at the time.