Harvey Weinstein faces retrial after #MeToo rape conviction overturned – Nationwide

Prosecutors requested for a September retrial for Harvey Weinstein throughout a listening to Wednesday in Manhattan, the disgraced film mogul’s first courtroom look since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals courtroom final week.

Considered one of Weinstein’s accusers, Jessica Mann, is ready to testify once more, prosecutor Nicole Blumberg instructed the decide, suggesting locking in a date after Labour Day.

Blumberg famous Mann was within the courtroom Wednesday, and stated she desires everybody to know that the defendant “could have energy” however “she has the reality.”

“We imagine on this case and will probably be retrying this case,” she stated.

Weinstein, carrying a navy blue swimsuit, was seated in a wheelchair on the preliminary listening to. The 72-year-old, who has cardiac points and diabetes, has been in a hospital since his return to the town jail system Friday from an upstate jail.

In courtroom, his legal professional, Arthur Aidala, stated he has no concern about his shopper’s psychological skills, describing Weinstein as “sharp as a tack. As sharp as he ever was.”

Aidala stated his shopper desires to show his innocence: “It’s a brand new trial. It’s a brand new day.”

Within the New York case that’s now overturned, Weinstein was convicted of rape within the third diploma for an assault on aspiring actor Mann in 2013, and of forcing himself on a TV and movie manufacturing assistant, Mimi Haley, in 2006. Weinstein had pleaded not responsible and maintained any sexual exercise was consensual.

The Related Press doesn’t typically determine folks alleging sexual assault except they consent to be named, as Haley and Mann have.

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What led to Harvey Weinstein’s overturned 2020 rape conviction?

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Talking after the listening to, Haley’s lawyer, Gloria Allred, stated her shopper nonetheless hasn’t determined whether or not she desires to testify on the retrial, noting that doing so on the unique trial was traumatizing and painful. Haley was not in courtroom Wednesday, Allred stated.

Weinstein was additionally convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of one other rape and continues to be sentenced to a different 16 years in jail in California.

However he stays in custody in New York, and can head again to Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital, the place he’s anticipated to stay till his trial, Aidala stated.

“He’s in fixed ache that he’s preventing by. He’s preventing the perfect he can,” the legal professional stated, including that he has however been studying avidly behind bars, together with biographies on Abraham Lincoln and Eleanor Roosevelt.

“Harvey Weinstein was used to consuming champagne and consuming caviar and now he’s on the commissary paying for potato chips and M&Ms” however is making the perfect of it, Aidala stated.

On Thursday, the New York Court docket of Appeals vacated his conviction in a 4-3 resolution, erasing his 23-year jail sentence, after concluding a trial decide permitted jurors to see and listen to an excessive amount of proof circuitously associated to what he was charged with.

The ruling shocked and disillusioned ladies who celebrated historic positive aspects throughout the period of #MeToo, a motion that ushered in a wave of sexual misconduct claims in Hollywood and past.

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