Last week’s reversal of the 2020 rape conviction of Harvey Weinstein was a major blow to the Me Too Movement his conduct helped start.
Whether New York’s highest court was correct in its 4 to 3 decision will nevertheless force the women who previously testified against Weinstein to take the stand again and relive their trauma. Ashley Judd, one of Weinstein’s victims, described the ruling as “an act of institutional betrayal.” One of the dissenting Judges, Madeline Singas, aptly noted that “[f]orgotten are the women who bear the psychological trauma of sexual violence and the scars of testifying again and again.” At least the decision will have little benefit, if any, to Weinstein who still remains convicted of rape in California and is serving a 16-year sentence.
The basis for the reversal was the majority’s view that the prosecution presented other bad acts for the sole purpose of establishing Weinstein’s propensity for criminality. New York’s highest court held that:
The trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than complainants of the underlying crimes because that testimony served no material non-propensity purpose. The court compounded the error when it ruled that defendant, who had no criminal history, could be cross-examined about those allegations as well as numerous allegations of misconduct that portrayed defendant in a highly prejudicial light.
In a forty (40) page opinion, the majority concluded that, because the trial court allowed Weinstein to be cross-examined on those other allegations — some of which had nothing to do with sexual assaults, such as using a friend’s social security number in a passport application, having his company pay his personal expenses, making threats against employees, abandoning a colleague by the side of the road in a foreign country, cursing at restaurant staff after they told him the kitchen was closed and throwing a table of food — he did not take the witness stand in his own defense. Frankly, the majority was correct. The dissenting opinions, on the other hand, found the evidence was admitted not to prove that, because he committed these other crimes he must have committed a crime here, but to prove his intent and the victim’s lack of consent. While the dissenting judges also were correct, the bottom line is the trial judge allowed too much other evidence of bad acts to be used at trial. Hopefully on retrial the Court will better screen the evidence and Weinstein will again get what is coming to him, another criminal conviction.