During his six-week trial, Harvey Weinstein often nodded off during testimony. He looked pale and frail as he was wheeled into the Manhattan criminal courthouse, arriving from his secured unit at Bellevue Hospital Center.
Mr. Weinstein, once an imposing force in Hollywood, has been in poor health in recent years, according to his lawyers, who have listed diabetes, spinal stenosis and fluid on his heart and lungs among his many ailments. Last September, he was hospitalized for emergency heart surgery. The next month, he was diagnosed with cancer.
Mr. Weinstein’s condition played a role during jury selection in his first trial in 2020, when he used a walker to shuffle into the courtroom following back surgery. By then, he was no longer the robust movie executive sitting proudly at the front of awards ceremonies. Instead, potential jurors saw a diminished, considerably thinner man at the defense table, and prosecutors wanted to make sure they could look past his physical appearance.
Five years later, his health appears to be much worse, but this time prosecutors did not probe jurors’ feelings about it during jury selection. During their closing arguments, however, prosecutors tried to remind the jury that during deliberations they should remember Mr. Weinstein at the peak of his powers, when he was still a Hollywood mogul, wearing sharp suits and laughing with movie stars.
“I want you to remember it’s not the person sitting here today in the wheelchair,” Nicole Blumberg, a prosecutor with the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
She then pointed to an oversized picture of him at the Cannes Film Festival and said, “It’s that man.”
During his second New York trial on charges of rape and criminal sexual act, Mr. Weinstein’s health also became an issue for Judge Curtis Farber. Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers asked him to get their client out of Rikers Island, the sprawling 400-acre jail complex where he was sent in April 2024 after his 2020 conviction for rape was overturned.
Before that, he had been serving a 23-year sentence at the Mohawk Correctional Facility in Rome, N.Y., where he was being treated in the medical unit for his various maladies.
At Rikers, according to his lawyers, his health declined precipitously.
The conditions were so poor that Mr. Weinstein begged Judge Farber in January to push up the date of his trial so he could get out of the jail, which he described as a “hell hole.”
“Every day I’m at Rikers Island, it’s a mystery to me how I’m still walking,” Mr. Weinstein said, according to ABC News. “I’m asking and begging you, Your Honor; I can’t hold on anymore.”
His pleas have made him an unlikely voice for reform at Rikers, whose conditions civil libertarians and lawyers for inmates have long described as inhumane.
A civil court judge ordered the transfer of Mr. Weinstein from Rikers to Bellevue in April, shortly after his trial began. Lawyers for the City of New York have appealed the decision, setting off a legal fight that Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers said could set “precedent for those incarcerated.”
Mr. Weinstein has become a “voice of advocacy against Rikers Island, and potentially other prisons, highlighting the unlawfulness of inhumane treatment of inmates, and violations of their constitutional rights,” his lawyer, Imran H. Ansari, said in an email.
Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
Maria Cramer is a Times reporter covering the New York Police Department and crime in the city and surrounding areas.
The post Weinstein’s Declining Health Loomed Over His Second Trial appeared first on New York Times.
