Nearly a decade after an earthquake of sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein ended his Hollywood career and triggered the #MeToo swell that rippled across the world, the disgraced film producer is set to face his fourth and possibly final sentencing in Manhattan on Wednesday.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Curtis Farber could impose up to 20 years against the 74-year-old producer for violently sexually assaulting a former assistant for Project Runway. The crime, committed against Miriam Haley in 2006, already resulted in a 23-year sentence for the Miramax founder when a jury first found him guilty of it in 2020, but that conviction was overturned in 2024 and retried a second time last year.
Before serving his New York sentence, Weinstein may first be required to complete a 16-year term in California, where he’s expected to be extradited after spending the last few years on Rikers Island and in Bellevue’s prison ward awaiting the two trials in Manhattan.
Haley, a Swedish citizen, provided graphic testimony against Weinstein at both trials, describing in disturbing detail how Weinstein pinned her on a bed inside his SoHo loft and forcibly performed forcible oral sex on her while she was menstruating.
Last year’s jury agreed with the first in finding Weinstein guilty of the sexual assault, but the panel could not reach a unanimous verdict on an additional victim in the prosecution’s case, Jessica Mann. The judge called a partial mistrial after deliberations devolved into heated arguments among jurors.
Mann’s rape allegations were brought before a jury for a third time this March and resulted in another mistrial, with jurors again unable to come to a unanimous decision. Bragg soon after said his office had come to the decision not to retry the case after consulting with the former actress from Washington, who had collectively spent dozens of hours testifying against Weinstein since the office began investigating him almost a decade ago.
Mann and Haley’s accounts, and those of two women in California who he was found guilty of raping and sexually assaulting in 2002, represented a fraction of the more than 80 women who have come forward since 2017.
AP Photo/Richard Drew
Jessica Mann arrives for Harvey Weinstein’s trial in Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Long considered the most influential man in Hollywood, Weinstein launched some of the world’s most famous faces to stardom at Miramax and The Weinstein Company, producing and distributing classics like “Pulp Fiction,” “Good Will Hunting,” and “Bridget Jones Diary,” among scores of Oscar-winning films.
An unprecedented public reaction followed the cascade of rape and sexual assault allegations that surfaced against him in October 2017 in a set of exposes in The New York Times and The New Yorker that detailed an entrenched “casting couch” culture in Hollywood and scores of actresses paid to stay silent about Weinstein’s abuse or blackballed entirely from the industry.
The reporting appeared to pierce a culture of silence surrounding the commonplace nature of sexual abuse and harassment in the workplace, with women across the U.S. and the world posting to social media under the hashtag #MeToo to allege abuse taking place everywhere from research facilities in Antarctica to combat zones in the Middle East, to newsrooms, farming facilities, and on restaurant and factory floors.
The investigations that followed led to rape and sexual charges in New York in 2019 and the subsequent trial and conviction that was overturned.
In 2022, he was convicted in L.A. of raping and sexually assaulting Italian model and actor Evgeniya Chernyshova in early 2013, around the same time as the attack at a Midtown hotel alleged by Mann.
Weinstein is appealing his convictions on both coasts and maintains that he has never committed rape or sexual assault.
The ailing moviemaker has faced several health woes amid his legal cases, including receiving cancer treatment and undergoing heart surgery.
Last year, he begged Judge Farber to hurry to trial the last indictment he faced as he was “gasping for air” at Rikers.
“I’m gasping for air,” Weinstein said, asking the judge to move a different trial so he could “get out of this hellhole as quickly as possible.”