American producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison in Los Angeles for rape. For acts committed in a Beverly Hills hotel in 2013, the 70-year-old former “king” of cinema, producer of award-winning hits like “Pulp Fiction”, faced up to 18 years in prison.
He is already serving a 23-year prison sentence after his conviction in New York in 2020 for similar facts and which he appealed.
The prosecution had portrayed Harvey Weinstein as an all-powerful ogre, a “predator” whose stranglehold on Hollywood – the films he produced have received more than 330 Oscar nominations and 81 statuettes – has long kept his victims from speaking out, for fear of career repercussions.
This second trial for Harvey Weinstein, whose fall in 2017 freed the speech of many women and spawned the #MeToo movement, saw four women testify anonymously against him. During several weeks of a bitter and trying hearing, sometimes interrupted by the plaintiffs’ sobs, they accused the former Hollywood titan of having forced them into sex in hotels in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles between 2004 and 2013.
