The lawyer of Harvey Weinstein reported this Saturday that the former movie mogul has been hospitalized to undergo a battery of tests following his return to New York after an appeals court would annul the rape conviction handed down against him in 2020.
Lawyer Arthur Aidala has said that Weinstein was transferred to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan after his arrival at the city’s lockup on Friday. “They examined him and sent him to Bellevue. He seems to need a lot of help, physically. He has a lot of problems. They are doing all kinds of tests on him. His health is a disaster,” he said.
Harvey Weinstein is scheduled to appear in a New York court next Wednesday as a first step toward being able to be tried againthe US press reports this Saturday.
The appeals court’s ruling in favor of annulling the conviction was approved by a slim majority of 4-3 judges and was based on the fact that several women who claimed to have been Weinstein’s victims were improperly called to testify as witnesses, when the The accusations they made were not part of the facts being tried.
The former audiovisual magnate has been serving a 23 year sentence in a New York prison after being convicted of forcibly performing oral sex on a production assistant in 2006 and of third-degree rape in an attack on a young actress in 2013.
After being found guilty in March 2020, he was sent to Los Angeles to be tried there for other sexual crimes and was again convicted. This last time 16 years in prison, so The annulment of last Thursday would not mean his release, but rather his possible transfer to California to fulfill the second sentence.
Weistein’s first trial, now overturned, opened the spigot to an American, then global, movement baptized as #MeToo, and which consisted of public testimonies from women who claimed to have been victims of sexual abuse in the world of entertainment and in work environments in general.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Thursday expressed its displeasure, and in a statement from its spokeswoman, Emily Tuttle, said: “We will do everything in our power to retry the case and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of assault.” sexual”.
Miriam Haley, one of the women who denounced Weinstein and whose case led to him being sent to prison, told the press on Friday that she is still considering whether to testify in a new trial: “It was traumatizing. I definitely don’t want to go through that again. But for the sake of moving forward and doing the right thing, and because that’s what happened, I would consider it