Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood mogul whose conviction for sex crimes in New York was overturned in April, is facing a new indictment, Manhattan prosecutors said in a hearing on Thursday.
Mr. Weinstein, 72, was not in court on Thursday morning. He was still in Bellevue Hospital after being rushed from the Rikers Island jail complex for emergency heart surgery on Monday morning, according to jail records.
The new indictment is still sealed and awaiting Mr. Weinstein’s recovery so he can be arraigned, prosecutors said.
Mr. Weinstein “almost died,” and his health has continued to deteriorate in jail, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, told the court. The judge, Curtis Farber, ordered that Mr. Weinstein be kept in Bellevue’s prison ward indefinitely, but said he could be moved to a regular bed if needed,
Justice Farber set a hearing for Sept. 18 during which Mr. Weinstein would be arraigned on the new indictment if he is medically cleared to appear.
The downfall of Mr. Weinstein, who was responsible for a long string of productions in Hollywood, including movies like “Shakespeare in Love” and “Chocolat,” helped ignite the global #MeToo movement. His conviction for sex crimes in New York was followed by another conviction and a sentence of 16 years in prison in a separate sex-crimes case in Los Angeles.
However, in April, in a 4-to-3 decision, the New York Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in New York. The judges agreed with Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers that the trial judge had improperly allowed prosecutors to call several accusers as witnesses, even though their allegations had not led to charges. The decision had deprived Mr. Weinstein of a fair trial, they said.
Immediately after the decision, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, said that he would try to prosecute Mr. Weinstein again.
In the months since, prosecutors have said that they have identified allegations of rape and sexual assault against Mr. Weinstein that they plan to present to a grand jury. According to the prosecutors, the events, some of which prosecutors knew of at the time of the first trial, occurred within the statute of limitations to bring charges.
In a hearing this month, prosecutors said they had alerted Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, Mr. Aidala, that they had begun presenting to a grand jury in mid-August and gave some details about three new allegations of sexual assaults that Mr. Weinstein could be questioned about if he decided to testify before the panel.
According to one of the prosecutors, Matthew Colangelo, one of the allegations involves a sexual assault at the Tribeca Grand Hotel. A second assault allegedly took place during the “winter season” of 2005 to 2006 at a residential building in Lower Manhattan, in either Tribeca or SoHo, he said. A third sexual assault was described as occurring in May 2016 in a hotel in Tribeca.
In July, Justice Farber set a tentative date of Nov. 12 to retry the case reversed earlier this year. The new indictment, as of now, would be a separate case.
On Thursday, Mr. Aidala argued that any charges that stemmed from the new indictment should remain separate. Sixty days is not enough time to mount an appropriate defense for both the new and existing charges, he said. Consolidating the cases and expecting both sides to be ready by November was “laughable,” Mr. Aidala said.
Nicole Blumberg, an assistant district attorney, told the court that prosecutors would “be ready to head to trial, with all of our survivors, by Nov. 12.”
At the height of his Hollywood power, Mr. Weinstein was viewed as a career maker. According to his accusers, he also wielded that power to harass and sexually assault women for decades, many of whom were young and trying to establish themselves in the film industry.
He was indicted in 2018 in New York on charges of rape and committing a criminal sexual act. Prosecutors in Los Angeles charged him with raping one woman and groping and masturbating in front of a second in 2013.
In 2020, a New York jury convicted him of raping one woman and committing a criminal sex act against another. In Los Angeles, he was found guilty of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object.
Mr. Weinstein is appealing his Los Angeles conviction. In Britain, prosecutors recently dropped a case against Mr. Weinstein just two years after authorizing indecent assault charges against him.
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