Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced ex-Hollywood movie producer whose crimes sparked the #MeToo movement in 2017, will be charged in the UK with sexual assaults dating back to 1996.
Aged 70, Mr. Weinstein has been serving a 23-year prison sentence for sexual assault and rape in the United States since 2020. Now incarcerated in California, he is also awaiting a new trial in Los Angeles for sex crimes.
On Wednesday, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the British prosecutor’s office, said in a press release that “it authorized the Metropolitan Police to prosecute Harvey Weinstein on two counts relating to the sexual assault of a woman in August 1996”. The prosecution was authorized “following a review of the evidence gathered by the police in their investigation”.
According to a press release from the London police, which must now formally charge Mr. Weinstein, the alleged victim is now in his fifties.
English justice does not provide for a statute of limitations for this type of crime.
Beginning in October 2017, the revelations and downfall of Harvey Weinstein sparked the global #MeToo movement to raise awareness and fight women against sexual assault and crimes.
In total, some 90 women — including superstars Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Salma Hayek — have accused Harvey Weinstein of harassment or sexual assault. He has always denied the facts, in New York as in California, saying that his accusers were consenting.
California trial
The one who reigned supreme in Hollywood was sentenced in 2020 in New York to 23 years of criminal imprisonment for a sexual assault in 2006 and a rape in 2013. In early June, the American justice rejected an appeal from the producer and upheld his judgment.
He is currently incarcerated in a prison in California, where he awaits a new trial in Los Angeles. He is accused of having raped or sexually assaulted five women in hotels between 2004 and 2013. He will plead not guilty and has always claimed that his victims were consenting.
In Los Angeles, the producer of pulp Fiction faces up to 140 years in prison, in addition to his New York conviction.
In the United Kingdom, the British police had opened an investigation in October 2017 for sexual assault on a woman, then had widened their investigations concerning the American producer to include three alleged sexual assaults committed against a second woman.
Before his fall, the American producer has long made the rain and the good weather in Hollywood. At the end of the 1970s, he had founded the Miramax studio with his brother, sold to Disney in 1993, then The Weinstein Company, behind great successes, such as Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino.
Over the years, Mr. Weinstein’s films have received more than 300 Oscar nominations and 81 statuettes.
The announcement of British charges against Harvey Weinstein comes two weeks after American actor Kevin Spacey, 62, was charged in the United Kingdom with four sexual assaults on men, during a period when he was artistic director of a London theatre.
His indictment, three years after the abandonment of the charges against him in his country, had given a new echo to the accusations that have emerged against him since the Weinstein scandal, which brought a blow to the career of the star of the series. House of Cards.