BREAKINGNEWS: Hollywood movie moghul Harvey Weinstein jailed for 23 years in sex assault cases
New York/IBNS: Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood movie producer against whom a series of sexual assault charges were brought by women, including top actresses, has been sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault, media reports said.
Weinstein,67, was found guilty by a court in New York last month. The accusations against him by women triggered the "MeToo movement against sexual assaults and harassment by powerful men.
According to BBC, Weinstein's lawyers had appealed for leniency, insisting that even the minimum sentence of five years could be a "life sentence" for him. He came to court on a wheelchair.
Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob Weinstein had co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced successful independent films including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), The Crying Game (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), and Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love.
In October 2017, following sexual abuse allegations, Weinstein was dismissed from his company and expelled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Since 2017, over eighty women have accused Weinstein of sexual harassment, assault or rape dating back to 1980 till 2015.
Weinstein would invite actresses or models into his hotel room or office ostensibly to discuss their career, and then he would demand sex, often forcing him on them.
Former colleagues and collaborators of Weinstein told reporters that these activities were enabled by employees, associates and agents who set up these meetings, as well as lawyers and publicists who suppressed complaints with payments and threats.
Top actress like Gwyneth Paltrow said she was sexually harassed by Harvey when she was 22 years old and Harvey Weinstein had cast her for the lead in the Jane Austen adaptation “Emma.”
“I was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified,” she later said in an interview, publicly disclosing that she was sexually harassed by the man who ignited her career and later helped her win an Academy Award, reported The New York Times.
Even an actress like Angelina Jolie said that in the late 1990s, she rejected Harvey Weinstein’s unwanted advances in a hotel room.
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