Opinion | Harvey Weinstein and the Limits of ‘She Said, She Said, She Said’ - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/27/opinion/harvey-weinstein-conviction-me-too.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_2024
Those following Mr. Weinstein’s legal battles always knew there was a possibility that his conviction would be thrown out on appeal. But the nature of the decision, and its focus on several women who testified that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, even though none of those allegations had led to charges, revealed something that unsettled me.
Until Thursday, it seemed that we had entered a new age of accountability, legal and social, not just for Mr. Weinstein but also for the abusers who’d come after him. Even as the #MeToo movement fell short in some ways, the Weinstein case felt like a cultural marker — an Arthur’s sword in the stone moment, in which something irreversible happened. The monster of #MeToo had been vanquished, and it changed something about the way we understood vulnerability and power.
And then, suddenly, it didn’t.
To be clear, Thursday’s ruling will not spring Mr. Weinstein from behind bars. He already faced an additional 16 years from a separate conviction in California, and he may be sent there to serve out that sentence.
But in establishing the limits of these so-called prior bad act witnesses — an attempt by the prosecution in the case to show a pattern of coercion — the ruling did something else: It highlighted the striking gap between how we’ve come to believe women inside the courtroom and outside it.
While Mr. Weinstein’s accusers could, as Ms. Kantor wrote, fill a courtroom — and the women who proclaimed #MeToo in their wake could populate a small country — much of Mr. Weinstein’s appeal rested precisely on the argument that those voices ended up hurting, not helping, the case. As I read and reread the ruling, I realized the same swelling chorus of victims that made it possible for Mr. Weinstein to be held to account in the court of public opinion had somehow saved him in the court of law.
“What I tell my students is to think about the courtroom as an alternate universe,” said the legal scholar Deborah Tuerkheimer, when I called her to ask if I was crazy not to have seen this coming. A former Manhattan prosecutor and the author of the book “Credible: Why We Doubt Accusers and Protect Abusers,” she explained that, indeed, there is a tension between the principles of criminal prosecution — which tend to limit a defendant’s “other bad acts” or past behavior — and public perception of a credible allegation.
It is frustrating, of course, that the very reason there are so many women available to speak out is that the legal system has failed them from the start. In the Weinstein case, many of the accusations were about sexual harassment, which is a civil, not criminal, violation. Others fell beyond the statute of limitations.
But the legal system is not adequately set up to prosecute people accused of being serial sexual predators like Mr. Weinstein; it is, rightly, supposed to protect innocent people from being judged by their past behavior. (A person who has stolen once is not a lifelong thief, for one.) But sex crimes are more slippery than that, with patterns and power dynamics and less likelihood witnesses. Which can leave prosecutors in a Catch-22: To any casual observer, Mr. Weinstein’s history of accusations of abuse seems as though it should be admissible, and yet it was not.