Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 15 years in prison for sexual assault
Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, after a jury found him guilty last year of committing a criminal sexual act against a former assistant.In a victim impact ...
Disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, after a jury found him guilty last year of committing a criminal sexual act against a former assistant.
In a victim impact statement in court, Miriam Haley said the assault had had a "devastating effect on my life and sense of security that may never go away".
Appearing in court in a wheelchair, Weinstein denied the allegations but apologised to "anyone I may have hurt by my actions".
Weinstein has already spent several years jailed in New York while he has faced three trials in New York over rape and abuse allegations. He has a separate conviction for sex crimes in Los Angeles.
This is the second time he has been given a prison sentence in the Miriam Haley case.
Weinstein was originally convicted and sentenced in the case in a 2020 trial, where he was also found guilty of raping actress Jessica Mann. But in 2024, New York's highest court overturned the convictions, ruling Weinstein did not get a fair trial.
He was retried and convicted again last year on a single charge of a criminal sexual act against Haley.
Weinstein, 74, is currently being held in a prison ward at New York's Bellevue Hospital for a series of ailments reported during his incarceration.
Once the high-flying producer behind Miramax, the studio that produced hits like Shakespeare in Love, Weinstein fell from grace after the New York Times and the New Yorker revealed multiple women's allegations of sexual assault stretching back decades.
The accusations against him sparked the #MeToo movement, but New York prosecutors have had to navigate a twisting path in securing convictions and sentences.
The 2020 trial was for charges involving Haley and Mann.
Haley testified that Weinstein had assaulted her in a bedroom in his Manhattan apartment in 2006.
"I just thought, I have to stand up for myself. I have to stand up for the truth," she told the BBC of her decision to testify.
In a retrial last year, the jury found him not guilty of sexually assaulting model Kaja Sokola.
No verdict was reached in two trials on a charge of rape related to Mann.
The jury could not reach a verdict on a rape charge involving Mann and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg pursued another trial on that charge. In May, the jury in the retrial deadlocked and the judge declared a mistrial.
Meanwhile, Weinstein is awaiting a new sentence in California for his 2022 conviction of raping and sexually assaulting an actress in a hotel room in 2013.
An appeals court denied Weinstein's request to overturn the California conviction, but ordered a resentencing. It found the judge who gave Weinstein his original 16-year prison term had considered the New York convictions that were later thrown out in determining the sentence.
Weinstein has consistently denied the allegations against him, and has said in interviews he believes he will be proven innocent.
As he sentenced Weinstein to a decade and a half in prison on Wednesday, Judge Curtis Farber criticised the former Hollywood mogul's stance.
"You took what you wanted by force and you have never accepted responsibility," Farber said.