Is There Still Hope for #MeToo Justice?

9:00 PM · April 30, 2024

Excerpt Hollywood Reporter hollywoodreporter.com

We all know he’s guilty — even the New York appeals court majority that ordered a new trial for Harvey Weinstein knows it. That makes the narrow, 4-3 reversal of Weinstein’s conviction all the more enraging.

Anyone who has ever watched a cop show knows how difficult it is to get a conviction in a sexual assault case. Yet the court majority found that the trial judge made an “egregious” mistake in letting three women testify about alleged sexual assaults even though their claims were not part of the charges against Weinstein (known as “Molineux witnesses”). Without that testimony, the majority concluded that Weinstein might have walked.

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Author Commentary

Ed Morrissey Apr 30, 2024 9:00 PM ET

First off, we don't start trials off by assuming guilt. "We all know he's guilty" is a tell for a political outcome rather than justice.

Second, the issue of Molineux witnesses is complicated, even where allowed under limited circumstances, as in New York. For one thing, introducing testimony of uncharged and unrelated allegations in the guilt phase of a criminal trial is prejudicial, but Masters misrepresents what the appellate court found on this issue. It wasn't the witnesses per se or their testimony, but that prosecutors cross-examined Weinstein on the basis of those uncharged allegations:

The lower court had allowed the three women to testify about encounters with Weinstein under a state law that allows testimony about prior acts.
But Rivera wrote that Weinstein had a right to only answer for the crimes charged.
“The synergistic effect of these errors was not harmless,” Rivera wrote, while noting Weinstein’s absence of a prior criminal history. “The only evidence against defendant was the complainants’ testimony, and the result of the court’s rulings, on the one hand, was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant’s character before the jury. On the other hand, the threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant’s right to testify. The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

Try him again. If he's obviously guilty, a competent prosecutor can make that case legitimately.