A New York jury has found Harvey Weinstein guilty of one of three charges he was facing during his retrial on Wednesday. The jury found him guilty of one count of a criminal sexual act but not guilty on another count of a criminal sexual act. It reached no verdict on one charge of rape, according to The New York Times.
Following a trial that began on April 23, closing arguments concluded June 3. The case was then turned over to the jury, who handed over their verdict, concluding five days of deliberations. A sentencing date was not available at time of publication. “He will serve the California sentence first, as it is now his primary sentence,” said Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, according to the Times.
“I feel like they are attacking, talking together, fight together. I don’t like it,” the foreperson said, according to a transcript with Judge Curtis Farber. “I feel it is not fair taking the decision about the past.”
The prosecutor on the case, Matthew Colangelo, argued that the concerns weren’t enough for a mistrial since some aspects of the mogul’s past were allowed into evidence.
In the first 2020 case, Weinstein was convicted on two out of five charges, one for a felony sex crime, the other for third-degree rape. Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison, but last spring an appeals court overturned the conviction. The ruling stated that prosecutors should not have been allowed to let some of Weinstein’s other accusers, whose allegations were not related to the charges he faced, testify.
In Weinstein’s retrial, prosecutors again focused on the testimony of two of the three women from the initial trial — Jessica Mann and Miriam Haley — as well as added a new sex-crime charge involving a third women, who was identified for the first time as Kaja Sokola.
Sokola, a former model from Poland, accused Weinstein of assaulting her at a Manhattan hotel room in 2006. She claimed that Weinstein told her he wanted to show her some movie scripts, but when they were alone, he allegedly pinned her onto a bed and forcibly performed oral sex on her.
In addition to the New York retrial, Weinstein was previously also convicted of rape and sexual assault, and sentenced to 16 years in prison, in a separate California case. He’s filed an appeal in that case, as well.
Weinstein previously claimed he was battling bone marrow cancer along with a host of other health issues that has kept him in and out of prison hospitals. “I’m in a serious emergency situation, I’m begging for you to move your date,” Weinstein told the judge at a hearing prior to his retrial. “I need to get out of this hellhole as quickly as possible.”
This is a developing story…
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