Harvey Weinstein set to be arraigned on additional sex crimes charges in New York
NEW YORK (AP) — Harvey Weinstein is expected to be arraigned Wednesday in Manhattan on a new indictment charging him with up to three additional sex offenses, his lawyer said.
Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala said the jailed ex-movie mogul will appear in court in person to face his latest legal hurdle after he was excused from a hearing last week while recovering from emergency heart surgery.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office disclosed at the Sept. 12 hearing last week that a grand jury had returned a new indictment charging Weinstein with previously uncharged offenses.
The indictment will remain under seal until Weinstein is arraigned. Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults: in the mid-2000s at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, now known as the Roxy Hotel, and a Lower Manhattan residential building, and, in May 2016, at a Tribeca hotel.
At the same time, Weinstein is awaiting retrial in his landmark #MeToo case after New York’s highest court overturned his 2020 conviction earlier this year.
Weinstein’s retrial is scheduled to begin Nov. 12. Prosecutors have said they’ll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein’s lawyers oppose that, saying it should be a separate case.
Aidala noted last week that because the indictment remains under seal, it’s not clear whether the new charges involve some or all of the additional allegations heard by the grand jury.
“We don’t know anything,” he said outside court last week. “We don’t know what the exact accusations are, the exact locations are, what the timing is.”
Weinstein has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
He has been at a Manhattan hospital following emergency surgery Sept. 9 to drain fluid around his heart and lungs.
A judge ruled last week to allow Weinstein, 72, to remain indefinitely in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital instead of being transferred back to the infirmary ward at the city’s Rikers Island jail complex.
In vacating Weinstein’s conviction and ordering a new trial, New York’s Court of Appeals ruled in April that the trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations from other women that were not part of the case.
Once one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, Weinstein co-founded the film and television production companies Miramax and The Weinstein Company and produced films such as “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Crying Game.”