Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 23 years in prison for rape, sexual assault

The verdict followed weeks of often harrowing and excruciatingly graphic testimony

Sexual Misconduct Women in the C-Suite, harvey-weinstein-ap

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison by a New York judge on Wednesday, two weeks after he was convicted of rape and sexual assault.

Judge James Burke ignored the pleas of Weinstein's defence team to give their client the minimum of five years behind bars.

Weinstein, 67, was found guilty of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape in the third degree on February 24, in a verdict hailed by the #MeToo movement.

He was found guilty of criminal sex act for assaulting production assistant Mimi Haleyi at his apartment in 2006 and third-degree rape of a woman in 2013. The jury found him not guilty on the most serious charge, predatory sexual assault, that could have resulted in a life sentence.

The verdict followed weeks of often harrowing and excruciatingly graphic testimony from a string of accusers who told of rapes, forced oral sex, groping, masturbation, and lewd propositions.

The conviction was seen as a long-overdue reckoning for Weinstein after years of whispers about his behaviour turned into a torrent of accusations in 2017 that destroyed his career and gave rise to #MeToo, the global movement to encourage women to come forward and hold powerful men accountable for their sexual misconduct.

The jury of seven men and five women took five days to find him guilty.

The case against the once-feared producer was essentially built on three allegations: that he raped an aspiring actress in a New York City hotel room in 2013, that he forcibly performed oral sex on Haleyi and that he raped and forcibly performed oral sex on Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra in her apartment in the mid-1990s.

Three additional women who said they, too, were attacked by Weinstein also testified as part of an effort by prosecutors to show a pattern of brutish behavior on his part.

The hard-charging and phenomenally successful movie executive helped bring to the screen such Oscar winners as Good Will Hunting, Pulp Fiction, The King's Speech and Shakespeare in Love and nurtured the careers of celebrated filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith.

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