The Daily - Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

When the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was convicted of sex crimes four years ago, it was celebrated as a watershed moment for the #MeToo movement. Yesterday, New York’s highest court of appeals overturned that conviction.Jodi Kantor, one of the reporters who broke the story of the abuse allegations against Mr. Weinstein in 2017, explains what this ruling means for him and for #MeToo.Guest: Jodi Kantor, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: The verdict against Harvey Weinstein was overturned by the New York Court of Appeals.Here’s why the conviction was fragile from the start.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Katrin Benhold. This is The Daily. When Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was convicted for sex crimes four years ago, it was celebrated as a watershed moment for the MeToo movement. Yesterday, New York's highest appeals court overturned that conviction. My colleague Jodi Kantor on what this ruling means for Weinstein and for the MeToo movement. It's Friday, April 26th. Jodi, you and your reporting partner, Megan Toohey, were the ones who broke the Harvey Weinstein scandal,

which really defined the MeToo movement and was at the center of this court case. Explain what just happened. So on Thursday morning, New York's highest court threw out Harvey Weinstein's conviction for sex crimes and ordered a new trial. In 2020, he had been convicted of sexually abusing two women. He was sentenced to 23 years in jail. The prosecution really pushed the boundaries, and the conviction was always a little shaky, a little controversial. But it was a landmark sentence, in part because Harvey Weinstein is a foundational figure in the Me Too movement. And now that all goes back to zero. He's not a free man. He was also convicted in Los Angeles. But the New York conviction has been wiped away, and prosecutors have the really difficult decision of whether to leave things be or start again from scratch.

And I know we spent a lot of time covering this case on this show with you, in fact, but just remind us why the prosecution's case was seen to be fragile even then. The controversy of this case was always about which women would be allowed to take the witness stand. So think of it this way. If you took all of the women who have horrifying stories about Harvey Weinstein, they could fill a whole courtroom of their own. Nearly 100 women have come forward with stories about his predation. However, the number of those women who were candidates to serve at the center of a New York criminal trial was very small. A lot of these stories are about sexual harassment, which is a civil offense, but it cannot send you to prison. It's not a crime. Some of these stories took place outside of New York City. Others took place a long time ago, which meant that they were outside of the

statute of limitations, or they were afraid to come forward. So at the end of the day, the case the prosecutors brought was only about two women. Two out of a hundred. Yes. And both of those women's stories were pretty complicated. They had disturbing stories of being victimized by Weinstein, but what they also openly admitted is that they had consensual sex with Weinstein as well. And the conventional prosecutorial wisdom is that it's too messy for a jury, that they'll see it as too gray, too blurry, and will hesitate to convict. So prosecutors working under enormous public

pressure and attention figured out what they thought was a way to bolster their case, which is that they brought in more witnesses. Remember that part of the power of the Harvey Weinstein story is about patterns. It's about hearing one woman tell virtually the same story as the next woman. It becomes this kind of echoing pattern that is so much more powerful than any one isolated story. So prosecutors tried to recreate that in the courtroom. They did that to searing effect. They brought in these additional witnesses who had really powerful stories,

and that was instrumental to Weinstein being convicted. But these were witnesses whose allegations were not actually on trial. to the charges that are being examined. Anything extraneous is not allowed. So prosecutors took this risk and it seemed to pay off in a big way. When Weinstein was convicted in February of 2020, it was by a whole chorus of women's voices. What seemed to be happening is that the legal reality had kind of caught up with the logic of the Me Too movement in which these patterns, these groups of women had become so important. And then to heighten things, the same thing basically happened in Los Angeles. Weinstein was tried in a second separate trial, and he was also convicted,

also with that kind of supporting evidence, and sentenced to another 16 years in prison. And on the same strategy, based on a chorus of women who all joined forces, basically joining their allegations against him. The rules are different in California, but yes, it was a similar strategy. So Weinstein goes to jail, the world's attention moves on, the story appears to end. But in the background, Weinstein's lawyers were building a strategy to challenge the fairness of these convictions. And they were basically saying this evidence never should have been admitted in the first place. And Megan and I could tell that Harvey Weinstein's lawyers were getting some traction. His first appeal failed, but by watching the proceedings, we could tell

that the judges were actually taking the questions pretty seriously. And then Weinstein's lawyers took their last shot. They made their last case at the highest level of the New York courts, and they won. And that panel of judges overturned the conviction. And what exactly do these judges say to explain why they threw out this conviction, given that another court had upheld it? Well, when you read the opinion that came out on Thursday morning, you can feel the judges' disagreements kind of rising from the pages. Picture like sort of a half moon of seven judges, four of them female, listening to the lawyers' arguments, wrestling with whether perhaps the most important conviction of the MeToo

era was actually fair. And in their discussion, you can feel them torn between, on the one hand, the need for accountability, and then on the other hand, the need for fairness. So there was a sort of sense that this is an important moment and this case represents something perhaps bigger than itself. Absolutely. There was a lot of concern, first of all, for what was going to happen to Weinstein himself. All of that symbolized, but also what sort of message they were sending going forward. So in the actual opinion, the judges divide into let's call them two teams. The majority are basically behaving like traditionalists. They're saying things like, here's one line, under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged.

They're saying there was just too much other stuff in this trial that wasn't directly relevant, didn't directly serve as evidence for the two central acts that were being prosecuted. So those majority opinion judges simply say that this was a kind of overreach by the prosecutor, that this isn't how the criminal justice system works. Exactly. And then if we call it the first team of judges, the traditionalists, let's call the dissenters the realists. And they're talking about the way sexual crimes play out in the real world and what's necessary to effectively prosecute them. And they are incredibly critical of the majority. They use words like, I'm looking at the pages now, oblivious, naive, phrases like an unfortunate step backwards, endangering decades of progress, perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence, allows predators to escape accountability. What they're saying is that these rules of evidence have to be somewhat flexible in the real world because otherwise they're not going to capture what really happened.

You can really sense the passion in this argument. You know, you really get the sense that this court is bitterly divided over this question. And what I'm hearing the dissent basically saying is that if we overturn this conviction, we'll be pushing ourselves backwards. Like, this is regress. And that the evidence served a really important function in the trial, that something is lost without it. But in the end, that point of view lost out. In this case, the traditionalist judges prevailed by a single vote. We'll be right back.

So Jodi, now that this conviction has been overturned, what's next for Harvey Weinstein? Well, back in New York, prosecutors have a really tough question to face, which is, do they retry this case? On the one hand, the Weinstein conviction meant so much to so many people that to just drop it seems very unsatisfying. But on the other hand, their attempt failed. Those women are going to be very difficult to get back on the stand. And are they really going to start from zero and do this all over again? Especially given that this conviction has just been overturned. Exactly. But meanwhile, the other thing to keep your eye on is the appeals in the California case. Weinstein's attorney told The Times that next month they are going to file an appeal in California that will make many of the same arguments that they did in New York. Now, the California rules are a little clearer on what evidence is admissible. So we

don't know exactly what's going to happen. But I should add that this attorney is the same one who succeeded in getting Bill Cosby's conviction thrown out. So is there a world in which all the convictions against Weinstein will be overturned? Sure, Katrin. It's very plausible. Wow. Now, given that, what does this ruling mean for other legal cases, for other MeToo cases that are currently moving through the legal system? Well, it's definitely a symbolic blow for the Me Too movement and also for accountability, which is part of what powers the movement. If you think of progress like a wheel spinning forward, part of what powers the wheel is accountability

because women only want to come forward if they think something may actually happen. When they see consequences for some men, it encourages others to step forward. But that doesn't really feel like a symbolic blow. That actually feels like a real setback. Because if the promise of accountability was what was driving the Me Too movement and sort of persuading all these women to come forward, then this ruling seems to be undercutting that. Well, it's also a sign of health in the system because what we're seeing in prosecutions across the country is more testing of this sort. Prosecutors are starting to bring cases that they never would have brought years before.

Maybe they're messier. Maybe the evidence brought years before. Maybe they're messier, maybe the evidence isn't perfect, maybe they're less traditional. And so to prove those cases, you have to try to get new kinds of evidence in court. And some of those attempts are going to succeed as they did in the Weinstein trial the first time around. And some of those efforts are going to fail as we see with the overturning of the conviction. But that kind of experimentation, potential expansion is potentially a sign of the health of the system and the idea that the legal system may be to some degree catching up with Me Too. So you're saying another way to look at this case is that it sort of

represents a legal system trying to navigate this new reality and sort of trying to figure out in real time how to deal with these kinds of cases. It's almost like a trial and error, you know, one step forward, two steps back dynamic. But also I want to add that, you know, you can't score Me Too like a basketball game. Every time there is some big outcome in a Me Too case, R. Kelly gets convicted, Governor Cuomo resigns, Bill Cosby gets convicted, Bill Cosby walks free. There can be this temptation to draw huge conclusions from that. You know, it's a victory for me too. It's a loss for me too. But these cases are not necessarily reliable indicators of what's really happening, what's really changing,

because what we're also seeing is real structural change on the legal level. Laws protecting women have changed in I think 23 states since 2017. The New York statute of limitations was extended for rape directly in response to the Weinstein allegations. It's now much longer. And recently, New York state opened

a kind of new window for survivors to sue for long ago offenses. So even as these individual cases rise and fall one by one, this system is slowly changing. So on the one hand, the Harvey Weinstein case actually changed legislation and created this whole new set of laws around these kinds of cases. But on the other hand, the criminal case against him was ultimately shut down. So I guess my question is, how should we think about the Weinstein case?

And does any of this change the way we should see his case as the kind of defining case of the Me Too movement and Weinstein himself as the kind of defining central character. I think the question that Megan and I have had for a long time is whether any criminal conviction in any city is really the best measure of what Harvey Weinstein did or didn't do. Because at its essence, the Harvey Weinstein story is about work. What was really special about him as a producer, his particular genius, was for making careers. He made Gwyneth Paltrow. He made Matt Damon, Quentin Tarantino, a lot of producers who are very successful now. That was kind of his superpower. But what we now know is that he also used that superpower

to manipulate and hurt women. In story after story about Weinstein, the same motifs come up. A lot of these women were really young. It was their first day, their first week, their first month on the job. They wanted opportunity. They wanted a piece of the action. So though the annals of the Harvey Weinstein story do include these instances of very troubling, allegedly criminal behavior like rape, the essence of the story, I think, is about what happens to women in the workplace, the opportunities they have, the way their ambitions can be used against them. And that's not something that any criminal court can capture. You know, when you talk to Weinstein victims, of course you hear the famous things they've said

about the kind of physical offenses, the bathroom stories, the hotel room stories, the kind of physical offenses, the bathroom stories, the hotel room stories, but you also hear them talk about their own careers. They say things like, I lost opportunities because of this, or I could never work in Hollywood again. And they say, my whole life is different because of that. I can never get those years back. And it's just not something that any criminal court is quite built to capture. So in a way, you're saying that the story is much bigger than those criminal allegations against Weinstein. In a way, they're like kind of the tip of the iceberg. But underneath, there is this whole culture of men abusing their power against women in particular in the workplace. Exactly. And thanks in large part to the Me Too movement, this is behavior that used to be widely tolerated, and it's no longer socially acceptable.

And Jodi, I wonder, have you spoken to some of the women that you spent years talking to and hearing from who came forward to share their stories about Weinstein and others? Have you spoken to them since this latest news? Yes. And I have to tell you, the Weinstein survivors are pretty resolute. They don't really see this as changing the story. When we first got the news from the court, the first person I called was Ashley Judd, the first actress who came forward about Harvey Weinstein. And what she said to me was, you know, that she was disappointed, that this was upsetting, but she was also unwavering. She said to me was, you know, that she was disappointed, that this was upsetting, but she was also unwavering. She said to me, we know what really happened.

And I guess in some ways, that's the legacy. The truth was aired in a court of law. We never knew what the legal system would do. We never knew whether he would be convicted or not. But the story stands. It's the women who are the narrators of this story now. And that won't be overturned. Jodi, thank you very much. Thank you. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments over whether former President Donald Trump should have legal immunity for allegedly interfering with the 2020 presidential election after he lost the race to Joe Biden. Trump's lawyers have argued that his actions, because he was still president at the time, should be shielded from prosecution. Their arguments were unanimously rejected in February by a lower court. But on Thursday, the Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed more receptive to Trump's claims. If the court rules in the former president's favor,

it could potentially delay any trial in the matter until after the election. it could potentially delay any trial in the matter until after the election. And one other thing you should know before you go today. This weekend, we're going to start sharing with you a brand new show from some of our colleagues. It's hosted by David Marchese and Lulu Garcia Navarro. And the idea of the show, simple and classic, every week, one of them will interview someone fascinating. Actors, politicians, athletes, writers, they're calling their podcast just The Interview. This weekend, their first couple episodes are perfect examples. Lulu speaks with Yair Lapid,

the leader of the political opposition in Israel. David speaks with actress Anne Hathaway. We'll be sending you those shows right here on Saturday and Sunday. I hope you'll give them a listen. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman, Ricky Nowetzki, and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Liz O'Balin. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Elisheba Itu and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily.

I'm Katrin Benholt. See you Monday.