Disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein filed an appeal to overturn a rape and sexual assault conviction in Los Angeles, California, on Friday, NBC News reported, weeks after he successfully overturned a similar conviction in New York. Weinstein has requested a new trial.
“Harvey Weinstein was tried by a system devoted to ‘getting him’ at all costs,” his publicist Juda Engelmayer told NBC News in a statement. “This appeal demonstrates nearly a dozen areas of brazen legal missteps that violated his right to a fair trial.” In the filing, Weinstein’s lawyers claim that he “stands wrongfully convicted of sexually assaulting Jane Doe 1.”
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office didn’t immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.
A Los Angeles Jury convicted Weinstein in 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexually assaulting a woman known as Jane Doe 1. The jury found him not guilty of sexual battery by restraint against a woman known as Jane Doe 2. It was unable to reach a decision on three other sexual assault counts with two other accusers. Weinstein pleaded not guilty and denied all allegations of nonconsensual sex.
Nearly three years prior to the Los Angeles conviction, Weinstein was found guilty in New York of two felonies — third-degree rape and first-degree criminal sexual act, but that conviction was overturned in April after New York’s court of appeals had determined that the judge overseeing that trial should not have allowed prosecutors to let accusers whose allegations were not part of the charges testify on the trial.
Speaking with the New York Times, Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala praised the decision “for upholding the most basic principles that a criminal defendant should have in a trial.”
Douglas Wigdor — the attorney who represented two of the accusers not tied to the charges — called the move a “major step back in holding those accountable for acts of sexual violence.”
