Harvey Weinstein indicted on additional sex crimes in New York

The disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein has been indicted on additional sex crimes charges ahead of his retrial in New York, Manhattan prosecutors said at a hearing on Thursday.

The indictment, handed down by a New York grand jury, is under seal until Weinstein’s arraignment, which is scheduled for 18 September.

Weinstein, 72, is recovering from emergency heart surgery on Monday at a Manhattan hospital and was not at Thursday’s hearing. Weinstein has been held at Rikers Island jail in New York since April.

At a recent court hearing, the office of the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, disclosed that prosecutors had started presenting to a grand jury evidence of up to three additional allegations against Weinstein, dating as far back as the mid-2000s.

Prosecutors had been seeking to retry Weinstein after his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges was tossed by an appeals court earlier this year.

Weinstein was indicted in 2018 in New York on charges of rape and committing a criminal sex act and was convicted in 2020 after a jury found him guilty of a criminal sex act in the first degree and rape in the third degree. He was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Then in 2022, in a separate case, a Los Angeles jury found Weinstein guilty on three counts of rape and sexual assault. He was he was sentenced in Los Angeles in 2023 to an additional 16 years behind bars.

In April of this year, a New York appeals court overturned Weinstein’s 2020 New York conviction, ruling that the judge overseeing that case prejudiced Weinstein with improper rulings and should not have allowed other women whose accusations were not part of the case to testify.

In May, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that it would retry the disgraced move mogul, and this summer a judge tentatively scheduled Weinstein’s retrial for the New York case to begin on 12 November.

The New York Times reported on Thursday that the new indictment, as of now, would be a separate case from the retrial of the 2020 case.

Weinstein is also appealing his Los Angeles conviction.

The announcement of the new charges against Weinstein on Thursday comes just one week after prosecutors in Britain announced that they would no longer pursue charges of indecent assault against Weinstein, after a review of evidence found “there is no longer a realistic prospect of conviction”.

In all, more than 80 women have accused the former movie mogul of various acts of sexual assault and harassment. In 2017, the stories detailing alleged experiences with Weinstein kicked off the #MeToo movement.

Weinstein has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.

The Associated Press contributed reporting