It was a “brutal” defeat for the cause of women’s rights, and for the #MeToo movement, said Moira Donegan in The Guardian. Last Thursday, the 2020 conviction of Harvey Weinstein for rape and sexual assault was overturned by the New York Court of Appeals.
The Hollywood producer’s trial had been a “symbolic milestone”: after accusations were made against him in 2017, more than 100 women came forward to accuse Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault and rape. Their stories sparked the global #MeToo reckoning and led, eventually, to his conviction.
The new ruling doesn’t mean that Weinstein will walk free; he was also convicted of rape in California in 2022 and was sentenced to 16 years in jail. But it does seem like a shocking reversal, an indication that the gains of #MeToo are being lost.
Weinstein ‘entitled to due process’
The truth is that the criminal case against him “has been fragile since the day it was filed”, said Jodi Kantor in The New York Times. New York prosecutors made “a series of gambles”, and ultimately they did not pay off.
While Weinstein’s alleged victims “could fill an entire courtroom”, only two of them could support a New York criminal trial. (Many of the accusations were of sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one; most did not take place in New York; others fell beyond the statute of limitations.) So prosecutors put a number of women on the stand as so-called “prior bad act” witnesses, to “establish a pattern of predation”.
But New York law in this area is complex, and the move risked violating a cardinal rule of criminal trials: “defendants must be judged on the acts they are being charged with”.
The appeal court made the right decision, said Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard. Weinstein’s lawyers argued successfully that the trial was flooded with “irrelevant” evidence. People are “entitled to due process”. Even “creeps like Weinstein” are “innocent until proved guilty”.
The ‘he said, she said’ problem
Yet the ruling “highlighted the striking gap between how we’ve come to believe women inside the courtroom and outside it”, said Jessica Bennett in The New York Times.
The difficulty with prosecuting sex crimes is that they generally have few witnesses, and come down to “he said, she said”. #MeToo seemed to offer a way round that: an “army of voices” could be assembled to show a pattern of offending, to support individual women’s testimony. In other states, prosecutors are given more latitude.
The case will “revive debate about whether the rules for such convictions need to be updated”.