OAN’s James Meyers
1:59 PM – Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Disgraced convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein made a last-chance bid to reverse his 2020 Manhattan sex crimes conviction, with his lawyer claiming that the “MeToo movement” destroyed the Hollywood producer’s right to a fair trial.
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Weinstein’s lawyers asked the New York’s court of appeals in Albany to drop the conviction, arguing that the judge stopped his right of a fair trial by “succumbing to the pressure” of the media’s feminist influence regarding sexual misconduct perpetrated by powerful figures.
“The trial judge allowed the #MeToo movement to get into the courtroom,” Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala told the The New York Post.
In June 2022, Aidala was rejected on arguments at a mid-level appellate court, and he now plans to make the same arguments in front of a seven-judge panel in Albany, New York, on Wednesday.
Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison after being found guilty by a Manhattan jury comprised of seven men and five women in February 2020. He was charged with a criminal sexual act in the first degree for forcibly performing oral sex on former Project Runway production assistant Miriam “Mimi” Haleyi and third-degree rape of hairstylist Jessica Mann.
Additionally, six women testified against the disgraced Hollywood producer. The women held tightly onto each other in the front row of the courtroom’s gallery in March 2020 as Justice Burke handed down the sentence.
However, Weinstein was not found guilty of the top charges involving Mann that included predatory sexual assault, which carried a possible life sentence.
Aidala will have 20 minutes on Wednesday to make his case for his client at Albany’s New York State Court of Appeals.
If Weinstein’s conviction is reversed, the DA’s office would still have the option of retrying him.
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