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 court docket look since his 2020 rape conviction was overturned by an appeals court docket final week.

One among Weinstein’s accusers, Jessica Mann, is ready to testify once more, prosecutor Nicole Blumberg informed the choose, suggesting locking in a date after Labour Day.

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

“We consider on this case and will likely be retrying this case,” she mentioned.

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 court docket, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, mentioned he has no concern about his shopper’s psychological skills, describing Weinstein as “sharp as a tack. As sharp as he ever was.”

Aidala mentioned 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 until 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, mentioned her shopper nonetheless hasn’t determined whether or not she desires to testify on the retrial, noting that doing so on the authentic trial was traumatizing and painful. Haley was not in court docket Wednesday, Allred mentioned.

Weinstein was additionally convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of one other rape and remains 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 mentioned.

“He’s in fixed ache that he’s preventing via. He’s preventing the perfect he can,” the lawyer mentioned, 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 mentioned.

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 choose permitted jurors to see and listen to an excessive amount of proof circuitously associated to what he was charged with.

The ruling shocked and disenchanted girls who celebrated historic features through the period of #MeToo, a motion that ushered in a wave of sexual misconduct claims in Hollywood and past.

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