A Los Angeles court on Thursday sentenced former film producer Harvey Weinstein to 16 years in prison for three felony sexual assault charges. Weinstein, who is 70 and was one of the founders of the Miramax film production companies and head of the Weinstein Company, was found guilty last December of raping a woman, forcing her to perform oral sex and penetrating her with an object. In 2020 he had already been sentenced to 23 years in prison for similar crimes by a New York court. During his trial in Los Angeles, he pleaded not guilty to all charges.
The facts for which Weinstein was convicted date back to 2013 and concern only one woman, whose name has not been disclosed. The court said Weinstein had raped her in a Los Angeles hotel room during a film festival. Weinstein was originally indicted on seven counts of sexual assaults involving four women, including Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and wife of California Governor Gavin Newsom, and model and screenwriter Lauren Young. Weinstein had been acquitted of the sexual assault charge involving one of the women in question, a masseuse, while the judges had failed to agree on the allegations made by Newsom and Young.
In 2020, however, he was convicted of third-degree rape for an assault that occurred in 2013 and of first-degree criminal sexual acts for an episode in 2006. Third-degree rape indicates forced sexual intercourse with a person who has not clearly given his consent, who is unable to give it or if the victim is under 17 years of age: it is less serious than first-degree rape, which instead involves threats, other types of coercion or serious bodily harm, and second-degree rape, which it involves constraints which, however, do not reach the level of a first-degree offense. The crime of criminal sexual acts in the first degree occurs in cases of anal or oral sex obtained under coercion or if the victim was physically helpless: it is the more serious of the two crimes for which Weinstein was convicted.
Weinstein’s case was the one that was most talked about in the entertainment world: it was in fact at the center of the journalistic investigations that in 2017 contained the first accusations against him, from which the #MeToo, the collective movement with which many women around the world denounced the sexual harassment suffered and until then kept silent. Among the dozens of women who have accused Weinstein of violence over time are Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman and Cara Delevingne.
