Harvey Weinstein’s New York Conviction Is Overturned (2024)

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Here are five takeaways from the overturned conviction.

The women became known as Molineux witnesses, a term that refers to trial witnesses who are allowed to testify about criminal acts that the defendant has not been charged with committing. In writing for the majority, Judge Jenny Rivera said permitting such testimony in Mr. Weinstein’s case had served to wrongly “diminish defendant’s character before the jury.”

The ruling, four years after Mr. Weinstein was convicted of forcibly performing oral sex on a production assistant and of raping an actress, did not surprise many legal analysts who had questioned whether prosecutors had taken too big a risk in their efforts to win over the jury.

In its decision, the court came to the conclusion that prosecutors had done just that and, along with Justice Burke, had violated a central tenet of criminal trials: Defendants should be judged only on the charges against them.

Here are five takeaways from the court’s ruling:

The court cited “egregious errors.”

The court said the trial’s fairness had been compromised by two key prosecution strategies: the use of Molineux witnesses and the prosecutors’ disclosure that if Mr. Weinstein took the stand in his own defense, they would ask him about dozens of allegations of other crimes and boorish, frightening behavior.

Before the trial, during what is known as a Sandoval hearing, Justice Burke said he would let prosecutors question Mr. Weinstein about 28 allegations that included physically attacking his brother, threatening to cut off a colleague’s genitals with gardening shears, throwing a table of food, and screaming and cursing at hotel restaurant staff after they told him the kitchen was closed.

That threat made it impossible for Mr. Weinstein to take the stand even though he was “begging” to testify in his own defense, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said during oral arguments before the Court of Appeals in February.

In its majority opinion, the court agreed.

“The threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant’s right to testify,” Judge Rivera wrote. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

The three dissenting judges slammed the majority.

Three judges — Madeline Singas, Anthony Cannataro and Michael J. Garcia — dissented in a pair of scathing opinions that accused the majority of continuing “a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”

The judges said the court had ignored evidence that the Molineux witnesses had established: that Mr. Weinstein had displayed a pattern of coercion and manipulation.

Judge Singas said the ruling would make it harder to use such witnesses in future sexual assault cases.

“Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” she wrote.

Judge Cannataro said the additional witnesses the prosecution had presented had helped upend the still-pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

The case clearly caused tension among the court, evident in a series of back-and-forth statements between the judges, with the majority defending itself against the dissenters’ claims that the ruling weakened the ability of accusers to push their cases through the criminal court system.

“We do not ‘shut eyes to the enduring effect of rape culture on notions of consent, and intent,’” Judge Rivera wrote, referring to part of Judge Singas’s dissent. “On the contrary, consistent with our judicial role, our analysis is grounded on bedrock principles of evidence and the defendant’s constitutional right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”

Victims and activists are devastated but remain determined.

Dawn Dunning, one of the Molineux witnesses who testified against Mr. Weinstein, said she was asked after the ruling if she regretted testifying.

“My answer is a resounding ‘no,’” she said in a statement. “I am a stronger person for having done so, and I know that other women found strength and courage because I and other Weinstein survivors confronted him publicly. The culture has changed, and I am confident that there is no going back.”

She and others encouraged Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, to retry the case. The 2020 case was tried under Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Mr. Bragg’s predecessor. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Bragg said that he would retry the case.

Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, called the news “unfair to survivors.”

“We still live in our truth,” she said. “And we know what happened.”

Ms. Judd appeared with several other sexual assault survivors and activists on Thursday at a hastily arranged news conference on the 29th floor of the Millennium Hilton in Midtown.

Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo, said one of the overarching goals of the movement — to get the court system to take sexual assault cases more seriously — is “long, strategic and thoughtful.”

“The bad thing about survivors is there are so many of us,” she said. “But the good thing about survivors is that there are so many of us.”

Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in California still stands.

Mr. Weinstein, who had been serving a 23-year sentence at Mohawk Correctional Facility in upstate New York, learned about the decision after someone at the prison showed him a news report about the ruling, according to his lawyer, Mr. Aidala.

He talked to Mr. Aidala just after 10 a.m., about an hour after the ruling came down.

Mr. Aidala said Mr. Weinstein “wasn’t emotional, like crying,” but he was “very gracious, very grateful.”

Even with the conviction overturned, Mr. Weinstein is not a free man. He is still facing a 16-year sentence in California, where a jury convicted him in 2022 of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel. He was to serve that term after his New York sentence. Now, he could be transferred to California, but he will most likely be transferred from state prison to Rikers Island, the jail complex in New York City, as he waits for Mr. Bragg to decide whether to push for another trial.

… But he will soon appeal it.

After Thursday’s decision came down, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer in California, Jennifer Bonjean, said she expected the ruling to help him when he appeals his California conviction on May 20.

A jury in Los Angeles Superior Court deadlocked on charges of sexual battery by restraint, forcible oral copulation and forcible rape in December 2022. Those charges were related to accusations brought by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and Lauren Young, a model and screenwriter.

But the jury found Mr. Weinstein guilty on three other counts — rape, forcible oral sex and sexual penetration — involving an Italian actress who testified that he attacked her in a hotel room in 2013. The jury acquitted Mr. Weinstein of one count of sexual battery involving a massage therapist.

In that case, as in New York, prosecutors were allowed to use witnesses who accused Mr. Weinstein of sex crimes that he had not been charged with. However, the laws around such witnesses are different in California.

Jurors in the California trial were “overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate, that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective,” Ms. Bonjean said.

Jodi Kantor, Jan Ransom, Chelsia Rose Marcius and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.

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What is the Court of Appeals, and how does it work?

In order for Harvey Weinstein to have the appeals court hear his case after he was found guilty in a Manhattan trial in 2020, he first had to appeal to an intermediate court — called the appellate division. A panel of that court unanimously upheld Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in 2022. From there, he then could pursue his case in the Court of Appeals.

According to Thursday’s ruling, two associate judges on the Court of Appeals did not participate in the Weinstein decision; they were replaced by two justices from the appellate division.

Mr. Weinstein’s criminal convictions in California still stand.

Ms. Bonjean added that she thinks Thursday’s decision — which found that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with but also for past behavior — will bolster the appeal in Los Angeles.

“The New York decision relates to the excessive use of other accusers — and the concept of uncharged accusers and bad acts is equally applicable in the L.A. case,” Ms. Bonjean said.

In the Los Angeles case, prosecutors called 44 witnesses, including four women who said they had been assaulted by Mr. Weinstein and were allowed to testify to show a pattern of abuse, though their accounts were not tied to the charges.

“They were overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective,” Ms. Bonjean said of the jurors in that case.

Ms. Bonjean, who represented Bill Cosby in the successful appeal of his sexual assault conviction, also said that the Los Angeles prosecutors erred by informing the jury that Mr. Weinstein had been convicted in New York, which might have unfairly swayed jurors.

“That turned the presumption of innocence on its head and tainted the entire trial and was even used to enhance his sentencing,” said Ms. Bonjean, who added that she expected to file an appeal in the California case on May 20.

The California prosecution in Los Angeles Superior Court focused in part on allegations that Mr. Weinstein raped a woman identified as Jane Doe 1 in a hotel room in February 2013. He was convicted in December 2022 of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object. But he was not convicted on four other counts.

At his sentencing, Mr. Weinstein pleaded for leniency, telling the judge that the case against him was not solid and did not justify a long prison term.

“I tried all my life to bring happiness to people,” Mr. Weinstein said in court. “Please don’t sentence me to life in prison. I don’t deserve it.”

Jane Manning, the director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project and a former sex crimes prosecutor, said that the appeals court decision in New York should not affect the case in Los Angeles.

“California law explicitly permits prosecutors to show that a defendant’s sexually predatory conduct is part of a pattern,” Ms. Manning said. “They explicitly permit evidence of similar crimes to be admitted in sex assault cases because they understand just how relevant this evidence is.”

Ms. Manning said that New York, on the other hand, does not have a statute that guides courts on this issue and “so it is left completely to the courts to determine what is and isn’t permissible when it comes to evidence of similar crimes.”

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Aidala called Judge Jenny Rivera, who wrote the decision, a “real hero for women.” The decision, he said, stated that “you can’t convict someone based on their entire life.”

Weinstein will now be able to return to court and tell his side without having “so much baggage” from his past divulged to the jury, Aidala said. “He’s been dying to tell his story from Day 1,” he said.

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Sara Ziff, the executive director of the Model Alliance, called on lawmakers in Albany to pass the Fashion Workers Act, which would provide labor protections for models, before the end of the legislative session on June 6. “While today’s news is devastating, it only strengthens our commitment to reforming industries predominantly made up of young women,” she said.

In their dissents, three judges offer sharp critiques of the majority’s decision.

Worse, she wrote, the court had made it harder for victims to hold their assailants accountable in future cases.

“Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” Judge Singas wrote.

She joined Judges Anthony Cannataro and Michael J. Garcia in the dissent. Judge Garcia did not write his own opinion, but agreed with the other two dissenting judges.

In his dissent, Judge Cannataro said that the additional witnesses the prosecution presented — who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him — had been vital to show Mr. Weinstein’s pattern of manipulation and coercion.

Their testimony, he wrote, helped upend the still-pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

In the Manhattan trial, Justice James Burke was careful in his decision to let prosecutors present evidence that showed that more “complex psychological and sociological dynamics” were at play, Judge Cannataro wrote.

The decision to overturn the conviction “represents an unfortunate step backward from recent advances in our understanding of how sex crimes are perpetrated and why victims sometimes respond in seemingly counterintuitive ways,” Judge Cannataro wrote.

Judge Singas said that the witness testimony of the additional women, who described their disgust and horror at Mr. Weinstein’s advances, had made it clearer to the jury that the former producer had to have known that he did not have the women’s consent.

“Their testimony explained the idiosyncrasies of the entertainment industry that allow assaults to be perpetrated by influential and powerful men against young and relatively powerless aspiring actresses,” Judge Singas wrote.

The majority appeared to take umbrage with the fierce statements of the dissenting judges, defending their ruling in numerous footnotes and throughout the opinion, a back-and-forth that suggested the decision had given rise to considerable tension among the judges.

Judge Jenny Rivera, who wrote for the majority, said Judge Singas “misconstrues” their analysis of why the additional witnesses were not needed to combat “rape myths.”

She pushed back on Judge Singas’s assertions that the court had made it harder for future victims to have their cases prosecuted, calling them “exaggerated claims.”

“We do not ‘shut eyes to the enduring effect of rape culture on notions of consent, and intent,’” Judge Rivera wrote, referring to part of Judge Singas’s dissent. “On the contrary, consistent with our judicial role, our analysis is grounded on bedrock principles of evidence and the defendant’s constitutional right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”

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“Abusers are given chance after chance to get back to their ‘normal lives’ while survivors continue to suffer from a lack of support, prolonged trauma, chronic illness, mental health struggles, economic harm and various forms of retaliation,” she said.

Despite their visibly deep disappointment about today’s decision, Judd, Burke and Graves are composed and smiling. All said they took solace in their strong bond. Burke said movements like #MeToo are “long, strategic and thoughtful.” She added: “The bad thing about survivors is there are so many of us. But the good thing about survivors is that there are so many of us.”

Weinstein’s accusers express fury and disappointment over the court’s ruling.

Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, called the news “unfair to survivors.”

“We still live in our truth,” she said. “And we know what happened.”

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, a Filipino Italian model, had accused Mr. Weinstein of grabbing her breasts and putting his hands up her skirt in 2015 during a business meeting at his office in Manhattan, but the Manhattan district attorney’s office decided not to charge him.

“If the D.A. had taken my case seriously in 2015, we wouldn’t be here,” Ms. Battilana Gutierrez said on Thursday. “This is an ongoing failure of the justice system — and the courts — to take survivors seriously and to protect our interests.”

Amber Tamblyn, an actress, writer and director who has been outspoken during the #MeToo movement, was flooded with anger when she learned of Thursday’s decision, calling it “a loss to the entire community of women who put their lives and careers on the line to speak out.”

Tomi-Ann Roberts, a professor of psychology at Colorado College, said the ruling infuriated her but did not shock her. She had accused Mr. Weinstein of sexually harassing her during an encounter at a hotel in 1984 that she believed was a business meeting.

“The only thing I can hope with this is that it re-energizes the #MeToo movement to demand that the criminal and civil justice systems do better at holding perpetrators accountable for this range of activities that are all degrading and all should be illegal,” said Dr. Roberts, whose research focuses on the consequences of sexual objectification.

Ms. Kendall added that sexual assault victims “who go up against powerful men rarely get justice.”

“But the important thing is that we do not stop speaking out,” she said. “Our culture needs to keep supporting silence breakers.”

Jodi Kantor, Jan Ransom and Maria Cramer contributed reporting.

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Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, said this news conference was pulled together quickly in response to the ruling. Many people, she said, had thought that the original verdict represented a change in how the justice system operates. “This moment makes it feel like we were wrong.”

Of Weinstein’s victims, he said, “I am deeply grateful to and humbled by the survivors who came forward in the brightest glare of a public courtroom to tell their stories at great personal cost and trauma,” adding, “The judicial system, in my opinion, has let them down today.”

Vance, noting that Weinstein’s conviction was previously upheld by a lower appeals court in “a thoughtful and unanimous opinion,” said the witness testimony at issue “was fair and necessary to explain to the jury how and why these women were repeatedly victimized.” He also said those witnesses were just a fraction of the women victimized by Weinstein over years of abuse.

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Justice Anthony Cannataro, who also dissented, wrote that the additional witnesses the prosecution presented were vital to show Weinstein’s pattern of manipulation and coercion. Their testimony helped upend the still pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

Weinstein, who has diabetes, eye problems and heart issues, has used a walker in prison and was housed in a medical unit, his spokesman said. “He’s been to the hospital for his eye issues,” said the spokesman, Juda Engelmayer. “He has been going through bouts of difficulty.”

Testimony by these witnesses was a key part of Weinstein’s appeal argument.

They did this by calling other women to the stand who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, including Dawn Dunning, Tarale Wulff and Lauren Young. Mr. Weinstein was not charged with assaulting those women, but Justice James Burke allowed them to appear for the prosecution as Molineux witnesses, also known as “prior bad act” witnesses.

The legal standard for prior bad acts in New York State dates back to the case of a chemist named Roland B. Molineux, who was convicted in 1900 of sending a bottle full of cyanide to the director of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club, with whom he had a personal feud. The cyanide killed a woman who was living with the club director and took the poison, believing it was a medicine.

During Mr. Molineux’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he had previously poisoned another rival in the same manner, with a mailed tin of poison masquerading as medicine. He was never charged with the earlier crime.

A year later, the Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in a landmark decision that said the state could not present evidence about a defendant’s other alleged crimes. Jurors, the court ruled, would believe a defendant “was guilty of the crime charged because he had committed other, similar crimes in the past.”

But exceptions to the ruling were laid out. For instance, a judge could admit such evidence to establish a motive for the crime being tried, to prove the crime wasn’t an innocent mistake or to establish a common scheme or plan.

Before letting the evidence in, the judge would have to weigh the extent to which the evidence helped to prove that the crime was part of a pattern, versus how prejudicial the effect on the jury would be, the court decided.

But those are both highly subjective judgments, according to legal experts. And that leaves defendants like Mr. Weinstein ample ground to challenge a guilty verdict in higher courts.

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A spokesman for Weinstein said the lawyers will respond to the New York Court of Appeals decision at 1:30 p.m. on the steps of the criminal courthouse at 100 Centre Street.

Here’s a timeline of Weinstein’s New York case.

March 19, 2018: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York orders a review of the decision not to charge Mr. Weinstein in 2015, calling Mr. Vance’s decision-making into question.

April 25, 2018: Mr. Vance assigns a new prosecutor to lead the investigation.

May 25, 2018: Mr. Weinstein surrenders to the police after being indicted on charges of rape and criminal sexual act. The rape charge stems from an alleged assault on an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, at a Manhattan hotel in 2013. The criminal sexual act charge involves Lucia Evans, a marketing executive who told investigators that Mr. Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him during a meeting in his office in 2004.

July 2, 2018: Prosecutors add charges against Mr. Weinstein related to accusations that he forced oral sex on Miriam Haley, a former production assistant on the television show “Project Runway,” in his Manhattan apartment in July 2006.

Oct. 11, 2018: A judge dismisses the forcible oral sex charge against Mr. Weinstein involving Ms. Evans after prosecutors acknowledge that the lead detective in the case withheld pertinent information that a witness had cast doubt on Ms. Evans’s account.

Aug. 26, 2019: Prosecutors obtain a new indictment against Mr. Weinstein, allowing them to call as a witness Annabella Sciorra, an actress who said that Mr. Weinstein raped her at her Manhattan apartment in 1993 or 1994.

Jan. 6, 2020: Mr. Weinstein is indicted in Los Angeles, where he is accused of raping one woman and groping and masturbating in front of a second within two days in February 2013. The California charges are filed the same day that the legal parties in Mr. Weinstein’s New York trial first gather in Manhattan to discuss jury selection and other legal matters.

Feb. 18, 2020: After a monthlong trial in which they hear testimony from Ms. Sciorra, Ms. Haley and Ms. Mann, among other people, jurors in New York began deliberations.

Feb. 24, 2020: The jury, consisting of five men and seven women, finds Mr. Weinstein guilty of rape and criminal sexual act but acquits him on three other counts, including the two most serious charges against him: being a sexual predator.

March 11, 2020: Mr. Weinstein is sentenced to 23 years in prison. His first stop in New York’s penal system is the notorious Rikers Island jail complex where he becomes inmate No. 3102000153.

April 10, 2020: Prosecutors in California add a charge against Mr. Weinstein, alleging that he committed an assault at a Beverly Hills hotel in May 2010.

April 5, 2021: Mr. Weinstein appeals his New York conviction, saying several women who had accused him of sexual assault should not have been allowed to testify.

June 2, 2022: A New York appeals court upholds Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crimes in a unanimous decision.

Dec. 19, 2022: After a trial that began in October 2022, jurors in Los Angeles return a mixed verdict, finding Mr. Weinstein guilty of raping and sexually assaulting an actress in 2013, but not guilty of one other charge. They are unable to reach a decision on three additional counts.

Feb. 23, 2023: Mr. Weinstein is sentenced to 16 years in prison in the Los Angeles case, with that prison term to begin after he serves his time in New York.

April 25, 2024: New York’s highest court overturns the 2020 conviction, ruling that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior.

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Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was fragile from the start.

Outside the justice system, evidence of Mr. Weinstein’s sexual misconduct is overwhelming. After The New York Times revealed allegations of abuse by the producer in 2017, nearly 100 women came forward with accounts of pressure and manipulation by Mr. Weinstein. Their stories sparked the global #MeToo reckoning.

But while Mr. Weinstein’s alleged victims could fill an entire courtroom, few of them could stand at the center of a New York criminal trial. Many of the horror stories were about sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Some were from out of state, especially California. Others fell beyond the statute of limitations. One of the original accusers was dropped from the trial because of allegations of police misconduct.

Manhattan prosecutors, under pressure for not pursuing charges earlier, made a series of gambles.

First, they proceeded with a trial based on only two victims, who accused him of sexually assaulting them but also admitted to having consensual sex with him at other times — a combination that many experts say is too messy to win convictions. To prove their case against Mr. Weinstein, who denies all allegations of non-consensual sex, the prosecutors had little concrete evidence.

So to persuade the jury, the lawyers turned to a controversial strategy that would ultimately lead to the conviction’s undoing. They put additional women with accounts of abuse by Mr. Weinstein — so-called Molineux witnesses — on the stand to establish a pattern of predation. The decision seemed apt for the moment: In a legal echo of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Weinstein was forced to face a chorus of testimony from multiple women.

The women’s testimony was searing, and when Mr. Weinstein was convicted in 2020, and then sentenced to 23 years in prison, it looked like the prosecutors had expanded the possibilities for holding sex offenders accountable.

“I did it for all of us,” Dawn Dunning, who served as a supporting witness in the trial, said in an interview afterward. “I did it for the women who couldn’t testify. I couldn’t not do it.”

But because New York law is open to interpretation on when those witnesses are allowed, the move risked violating a cardinal rule of criminal trials: Defendants must be judged on the acts they are being charged with.

That became the main basis for Mr. Weinstein’s repeated appeals of his conviction. For years, his lawyers have argued that his trial was fundamentally unfair, because it included witnesses who fell outside the scope of the charges. In addition to the alleged sexual assault victims, prosecutors brought in character witnesses who portrayed Mr. Weinstein as a capricious, cruel figure.

In 2022, a New York appeals court dismissed those concerns and upheld his conviction, after a vigorous debate by the judges. They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends,” but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.”

This February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s last-chance appeal, the proceedings did not garner much attention. But they felt quietly dramatic: Seven of the state’s highest judges, four of them women, were debating whether the man whose alleged offenses formed the cornerstone of the #MeToo movement had been treated fairly in court.

Today the court decided, with a majority that included three of those female judges, to throw out the conviction and order a new trial. Mr. Weinstein remains convicted in California and could be moved to prison there.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the judges wrote in their decision on Thursday.

“No person accused of illegality may be judged on proof of uncharged crimes that serve only to establish the accused’s propensity for criminal behavior,” the opinion continued.

But the decision landed by the slimmest of majorities: 4 to 3, with stinging dissents from judges who said they feared the implications of the court’s ruling. “The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Judge Madeline Singas wrote, adding that witness rules had evolved to be more flexible. “By ignoring the legal and practical realities of proving a lack of consent, the majority has crafted a naive narrative.”

Reached by phone a few minutes after the court shared its decision, Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, was unwavering in her own judgment. “That is unfair to survivors,” she said of the ruling.

“We still live in our truth,” she said. “And we know what happened.”

The heated back-and-forth from the New York judges, and the early reaction to the decision, launched fresh debate about whether the ground rules for sexual misconduct convictions need to be updated.

“The #MeToo movement showed how important it is to have accounts from multiple accusers,” Ms. Tuerkheimer said. But witness rules — which are strict for a reason — can leave courtrooms an “alternate universe in which evidence relevant to sex crimes is often kept from the jury.”

“There’s a tension at the heart of it,” she said, “and prosecution in the #MeToo era will continue to deal with this dilemma.”

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New York Court of appeals overturns the Weinstein conviction.

Responding on Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, announced that he would seek to prosecute Mr. Weinstein again.

“We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg’s office said. The case was originally prosecuted by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

For Mr. Weinstein, 72, the immediate impact of the ruling might amount to little more than a change of scenery. He is likely to be transferred from the prison in Rome, N.Y., where he has been held since 2020, to a facility nearer to New York City, where he will await the filing of new charges. But the opinion also raised questions about whether a separate conviction in California — on rape and sexual assault charges — can survive a similar legal challenge.

That case, which saw Mr. Weinstein sentenced to another 16 years in prison in 2022, also relied in part on witnesses whose accusations did not lead to charges. Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer in the California case said she planned to file an appeal next month.

A representative of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said it was “saddened by the news out of New York.”

“Our office had representatives in New York during the trial, and we are aware of the extreme difficulties the victims faced while testifying about the traumas that Mr. Weinstein caused them,” the representative said, adding: “We are confident that our convictions will withstand appellate scrutiny.”

The decision to overturn the New York conviction, while shocking to many, had been anticipated in legal circles. The criminal case against Mr. Weinstein had been viewed as fragile since the day it was filed, and prosecutors were believed to have taken risky, boundary-pushing bets to see it through. Still, the ruling was met with expressions of shock and anger by some of Mr. Weinstein’s accusers.

Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, called it “unfair to survivors.”

“We still live in our truth,” Ms. Judd said on Thursday. “And we know what happened.”

Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said his client learned of the decision when he was handed a news report on a slip of paper by someone in the prison facility.

“He said thank you more times than I can count,” said Mr. Aidala, who spoke to Mr. Weinstein by phone Thursday morning. “Harvey was very gracious, very grateful.”

The former producer’s health has been steadily declining in recent years. He has diabetes, eye problems and heart issues, has used a walker and was housed in a medical unit at the prison, the Mohawk Correctional Facility.

“He has been going through bouts of difficulty,” said a spokesman, Juda Engelmayer.

Mr. Weinstein had been a sharp-elbowed titan in the film industry, rising to power in the 1990s behind a stream of critically lauded, blockbuster movies under the Miramax label. His downfall after lurid accusations emerged from dozens of actresses and former colleagues became a primer for how the world viewed and treated many once-powerful men who used their positions for sex.

Mr. Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 100 women. But in New York he was convicted of raping an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, and assaulting a television production assistant, Miriam Haley, and sentenced to 23 years in prison. Thursday’s decision did not discount the credibility of the accusations against him. Rather, it found fault with the admission of the testimony of women whose descriptions of abuse fell outside the criminal case.

Prosecutors in sexual assault and other cases often seek to use them to establish a pattern of behavior. But doing so risks unfairly influencing the jury because the defendant is supposed to be judged only on the crimes he is charged with. For that reason, judges seek to limit such testimony, and the judge in Mr. Weinstein’s case, Justice James M. Burke, did not permit the prosecutors to call as many of those witnesses as they had hoped to. But he did allow a handful to testify.

The appeals court said that he should not have.

“It is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character,” Judge Jenny Rivera wrote on behalf of the majority, “but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges.”

Donna Rotunno, Mr. Weinstein’s lead trial lawyer in New York, praised the ruling on Thursday.

“They were prosecuting him for sins, not crimes,” she said. “This speaks to our justice system as a whole. The court ruling says to prosecutors: Winning at all costs is not your job. Your job is to put on a fair trial.”

The Court of Appeals also faulted the trial judge for permitting prosecutors to question the producer about uncharged allegations — spanning back decades — if he decided to take the stand. He did not testify.

Dawn Dunning, one of the women who prosecutors called to the stand even though Mr. Weinstein had not been charged with assaulting her, said on Thursday that she had no regrets.

“I am still proud that I testified and confronted that convicted rapist,” Ms. Dunning said in a statement, adding: “I am a stronger person for having done so, and I know that other women found strength and courage because I and other Weinstein survivors confronted him publicly.”

“The culture has changed,” she added, “and I am confident that there is no going back.”

In 2022, after a vigorous debate by the justices, a lower appeals court upheld Mr. Weinstein’s conviction. They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends,” but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.”

In a quietly dramatic twist, this February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s latest and final appeal, four of the seven judges were women, and Thursday’s majority ruling included three female judges.

Their decision landed with stinging dissents. “Fundamental misunderstandings of sexual violence perpetrated by men known to, and with significant power over, the women they victimize are on full display in the majority’s opinion,” Judge Madeline Singas wrote.

The decision to overturn promised to launch fresh debate about the ground rules for criminal convictions in sexual misconduct cases.

“The #MeToo movement showed how important it is to have accounts from multiple accusers,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former Manhattan prosecutor who is now a professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. But witness rules — which are strict for a reason — can transform courtrooms into an “alternate universe in which evidence relevant to sex crimes is often kept from the jury.”

“There’s a tension at the heart of it,” she said, “and prosecution in the #MeToo era will continue to deal with this dilemma.”

Jodi Kantor, Hurubie Meko, Maria Cramer, Nate Schweber, Maia Coleman and Katherine Rosman contributed reporting.