We interrupt your public health crisis for good news

March 11, 2020 8:26 AM

Harvey Weinstein sentenced to 23 years in prison for sexually assaulting two women in New York From WaPo link: [Mimi Haleyi] choked up while discussing the torture of testifying: “I showed up not as a perfect victim but as a human being.”
posted by Flannery Culp (65 comments total)

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.
posted by praemunire at 8:27 AM on March 11, 2020 [36 favorites]

I needed some good news today.

Die alone, unloved, and behind locked and guarded doors, Harvey. You deserve even worse, but I'll take this.
posted by tclark at 8:27 AM on March 11, 2020 [33 favorites]

It should have happened decades earlier but better late than never.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:29 AM on March 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

That is truly wonderful news.
posted by tavella at 8:30 AM on March 11, 2020

More coverage: NPR, NYT (usual paywall, but here's a link anyway), LA Times

“Throughout his entire adult professional life, defendant has displayed a staggering lack of empathy, treating others with disdain and inhumanity. He has consistently advanced his own sordid desires and fixations over the well-being of others,” prosecutors wrote. “He has destroyed people’s lives or livelihoods or threatened to do so on a whim.”
posted by Flannery Culp at 8:34 AM on March 11, 2020 [43 favorites]

Bye, Harv.
posted by Capt. Renault at 8:36 AM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Excellent!

[ rubs hands together ]

Who's next?
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:37 AM on March 11, 2020 [38 favorites]

This headline should be plastered in every c-suite, every executive office...hell, in every workplace position of male power.

It might act as a reminder for the next time they think "I can get away with this", they should realize that one of the most powerful men in hollywood, who raped with impunity, with thousands of wealthy, powerful proxies acting in his defense was taken down by women and will now rot in jail, and that they should think again.
posted by lalochezia at 8:42 AM on March 11, 2020 [45 favorites]

Unsealed court papers have revealed that disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein said that Jennifer Aniston “should be killed”. They also say he attempted to get help from billionaires Jeff Bezos and Michael Bloomberg to avoid being fired by the Weinstein Company.
posted by 445supermag at 8:50 AM on March 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

From the end of the NPR article:

Wednesday does not represent the last of Weinstein's legal woes. Los Angeles prosecutors have filed criminal charges of their own against the former producer, alleging two incidents over a two-night period.

posted by ZeusHumms at 8:53 AM on March 11, 2020 [12 favorites]

Say goodbye to the sun, fuckface.
posted by davelog at 8:54 AM on March 11, 2020 [15 favorites]

What do you call Harvey Weinstein going to prison for 23 years?

A good start.
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 8:57 AM on March 11, 2020 [54 favorites]

This, and Woody Allen's latest book being pulped, are the highlights of my 2020 so far.
posted by Faintdreams at 9:02 AM on March 11, 2020 [47 favorites]

Good! Fuck 'im!
posted by notsnot at 9:03 AM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

There aren't a lot of things to celebrate these days, but I'm so glad that he didn't just get a slap on the wrist.

I can only hope that this trend of shitty powerful men actually facing consequences for their shitty actions continues.
posted by (bra) at 9:11 AM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

For context, the 23 year sentence was on the high end of the possible 5-29 year range. More background here (written before the sentence was announced). Including: "In a letter arguing for leniency on Monday, his legal team said [context, charitable works, "historical fall from grace," other BS]." And finally: "They say Weinstein has also suffered from Mann’s claim that he doesn’t have testicles."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 9:12 AM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments deleted; first, please don't do fanfic about imaginary things that could happen to Weinstein, it ends up coming across as trivializing. Second, there was some confusion but the quote about being "a human being" is not from Weinstein, it's from one of the women who testified against him.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:15 AM on March 11, 2020 [13 favorites]

*fireworks emoji*
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:19 AM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Mr.Know-it-some: ""They say Weinstein has also suffered from Mann’s claim that he doesn’t have testicles.""

boo-fucking-hoo
posted by chavenet at 9:28 AM on March 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

Good.
posted by Fizz at 9:30 AM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Seems like there must be about a zillion enablers and protectors that should also be facing charges, he did all these horrible criminal things for so long. Wishful thinking, but man I hope there are lots of scared uncomfortable associates of his out there.
posted by Stonestock Relentless at 9:33 AM on March 11, 2020 [9 favorites]

thrilled for him to die alone in prison.
posted by poffin boffin at 9:34 AM on March 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

If you're a podcast person, I highly recommend Ronan Farrow's "Catch and Kill" podcast about breaking the story and all of the effort that went into covering it up. There were enablers aplenty.
posted by selfmedicating at 9:36 AM on March 11, 2020 [10 favorites]

I am pleased by this news and I hope it brings some peace and closure to the many survivors of his horrible assaults.

I don't believe in hell or god but I hope he dies in prison and then rots in hell. its the least he deserves.
posted by supermedusa at 9:39 AM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

My thoughts on this matter were first stated about 19 years ago. Obviously the staff of Futurama were all Kwisatz Haderachses.

Kwisatzes Haderach?
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 9:56 AM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

Also from those unsealed court papers is this quote from a note written to him by his brother Bob:

U deserve a lifetime achievement award for the sheer savagery and immorality and inhumanness, for the acts u have perpetrated. Oh I forgot. They were all consensual. Then what are u in rehab for? Sex addiction. Don’t think so. You wouldn’t have harassment, assault and rape charges u have now received, from 82 women for active consensual sex.

Hearing this from his own brother must have really wounded him. Good. He deserves all this and more.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:59 AM on March 11, 2020 [27 favorites]

Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.

Well, I can think of a few men at least as deserving, if not more so...
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:06 AM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

note to whichever relevant gods are accepting wishes: woody allen and roman polanski next please
posted by poffin boffin at 10:11 AM on March 11, 2020 [20 favorites]

poffin boffin: Think bigger! Think politicians!
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:13 AM on March 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

One can't help but wonder why he reached out to those particular billionaires for help. Has kind of a "you could be next, bro" feel to it.
posted by klanawa at 10:23 AM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

*
posted by Lyme Drop at 10:24 AM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

🥳
posted by a box and a stick and a string and a bear at 10:29 AM on March 11, 2020

At the trial, Weinstein was shamed by witnesses’ accounts of what they described as his abhorrent hygiene and deformed genitalia, the attorneys said.

Issues that could have been totally avoided if he'd just... not raped anyone.

Also apparently he's having some other health problems, including a significant fall.
posted by bile and syntax at 10:30 AM on March 11, 2020 [11 favorites]

The whole Epstein crony network needs to face this. Clinton, Trump, Andrew Windsor.
posted by bonehead at 10:45 AM on March 11, 2020 [24 favorites]

Harvey Weinstein Sentenced To 23 Years In Prison As Rape Accusers Fill Two Rows In Courtroom (Deadline, March 11, 2020) "Additionally, the now public files detail correspondence with the likes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple boss Tim Cook, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos and a pre-presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, with Weinstein begging for help from his powerful friends to thwart the eventually successful move of The Weinstein Company board to toss him."

Who's next? Timothy Hutton Raped Me When I Was 14, Says Canadian Ex-Model. (Buzzfeed, last updated March 6, 2020)
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:21 AM on March 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

Sounds to me like there needs to be some record-setting civil cases against the corporations that employed and enabled him. Billions of $$$ in liabilities might actually make them do something about these predators.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:37 AM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I guess it's just bad luck for him that he didn't get caught and prosecuted a lot sooner, or he might have lived long enough to survive his sentence. What a tough break.
posted by Flexagon at 11:40 AM on March 11, 2020 [4 favorites]

One can't help but wonder why he reached out to those particular billionaires for help. Has kind of a "you could be next, bro" feel to it.

Those particular billionaires own media companies and have (much, much smaller) sex/misogyny scandals in their recent past as well. I have no doubt that Weinstein wanted to appeal to their own self-preservation by minimizing his own crimes and telling them that they need to use their platforms to push back against the "excesses" of #metoo before they get caught up in it.
posted by Etrigan at 11:40 AM on March 11, 2020 [3 favorites]

ehhh Mimi Haleyi deserves a medal for courage and bravery, the Victoria Cross, the Purple Heart.
posted by Mrs Potato at 12:04 PM on March 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

It’s not just big businesses and corporations that coddled Weinstein. He had powerful political forces behind him as well.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 12:27 PM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

If we are all lucky, this is the last anyone will have to hear from him.

It would be nice if they would take away his money, too, and heavily fine whoever owns his company now for shielding him.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:28 PM on March 11, 2020 [2 favorites]

bile and syntax: "Issues that could have been totally avoided if he'd just... not raped anyone."

Agreed! Seems to me that after forcibly exposing someone your deformed genitals, you have voluntarily given up all future right to be shamed by a description of them. "Be lenient, you hurt my feelings" as a defense against sexual assault charges? What the almighty fuck. A lawyer should be disbarred for even bringing that into the conversation.
posted by caution live frogs at 12:38 PM on March 11, 2020 [15 favorites]

> Who's next?

While recognizing that there is a very long list of serial perpetrators out there who have strong claims on being next up in the hot seat, I nevertheless hope that the hammer of justice will come down hard on Weinstein's enablers before we move on from this. The ultra-shady private security firms run by ex-intelligence ops that he hired to ruin his accusers' credibility.. Any member on his well-compensated legal team who stepped even the smallest bit outside the lines of acceptable legal ethics.. Executives at his companies who saw the issue and treated it as simply one of risk management instead of an ongoing conspiracy to conceal the truth about criminal acts.. Every single person, down to the least important personal assistant on Weinstein's staff, should feel the specter of doom hanging over them if they willingly played any part in enabling this man to get away with his behavior because refusing to do so would have required them to relinquish money or position that they wanted to keep.

Their culpability and their deserved penalties will vary widely but I still dream (futilely, I suspect) that they will be exposed and pay some price. Because without such enablers Weinstein would never have been able to inflict nearly as much damage. Weinstein is undeniably responsible for his crimes. But he is not the only person responsible for them. And I don't feel like closing the book on this chapter until we have faced the reality of that and dealt with it.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:51 PM on March 11, 2020 [23 favorites]

caution live frogs, I don't think people should be disbarred for that, but more to the point - Weinstein got a fair trial, that terrible argument didn't go anywhere, and now he's going to get to die in prison, possibly of very poor healthcare now available to him.

Also, that he's upset by the people he victimized talking about his poor hygiene shows how very little regard he had for them. That his junk is messed up is probably not his fault, but his terrible hygiene is - he not only could have bathed adequately but could have easily paid someone to bathe him adequately - and it just makes the whole thing that much worse.
posted by bile and syntax at 1:03 PM on March 11, 2020 [8 favorites]

Genital differences are not shameful. Predatory behavior is. [interACT Advocates for Intersex Youth].
posted by sourcejedi at 1:06 PM on March 11, 2020 [18 favorites]

once again i'm reminded of the old saying that men are most afraid of having women laugh at them, while we are most afraid of murder and rape. boo fucking hoo someone said he had smelly ugly junk. how scary. may he spend eternity pushing his smelly ugly junk up a hill to a crowd of people laughing at him.
posted by poffin boffin at 1:16 PM on March 11, 2020 [29 favorites]

And the idea of degrees of rape is weird to me.

Rape in some jurisdictions covers basically any crime involving sex. IE: inappropriate touching to serial rape. The differentiation is via degrees. Tough on crime types like it that way because they can lump all offenders under the Weinstien serial rapist banner.
posted by Mitheral at 2:25 PM on March 11, 2020

According to CNN, Harvey’s defense attorneys listed many reasons why he should receive a five-year sentence, including, “Mr. Weinstein cannot walk outside without being heckled...” When I read that all I could think about was all of the women throughout history who have been heckled just because they were walking down the fucking street. This guy should die in jail.
posted by Bella Donna at 3:30 PM on March 11, 2020 [29 favorites]

He's still got a lot of money, and lawyers are totally OK with collecting payments to advance any possible argument they can think of.
posted by rhizome at 4:02 PM on March 11, 2020

It's good that his lawyers drain his savings. It will be interesting to see which ones show up when it's gone.
posted by sjswitzer at 4:05 PM on March 11, 2020

I did not read all the original reporting on the Weinstein case, and found this interesting:
Jodi Kantor tweeted: 23 years for Harvey Weinstein. @mega2e [Megan Twohey] and I just witnessed it for ourselves. Weinstein was cuffed to his wheelchair then rolled away. The women who testified sobbed afterwards. Irwin Reiter, his accountant of 30 yrs who secretly helped us break the story, sat just behind.

How the New York Times broke Harvey Weinstein (Washington Post, Sept. 8, 2019) Review of ‘She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story that Helped Ignite a Movement’ by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey

"Beyond the women who ultimately go on the record, a source deep inside the Weinstein Company proves crucial. Irwin Reiter, an accounting executive who had worked for Weinstein and his brother Bob for decades, meets with Kantor multiple times at the bar in the back of a stylish Tribeca restaurant. (Don’t they have dimly lit parking garages in Lower Manhattan?) Reiter describes people by their initials. He swears he’ll never meet Kantor again, then does. He encourages the reporters to look for more recent Weinstein misconduct, not just long-ago hush payments. Kantor and Twohey refer to him as “the source” or “Jodi’s guy.” Reiter mentions, but doesn’t share, a searing internal memo from a junior Weinstein Company executive who had departed because of the producer’s treatment of women. Finally, in one more late-night meeting, Reiter announces that “I’m going to pay a visit to the little boys’ room” and tosses his phone toward the reporter, open to an email containing the memo. “He’s telling me, without telling me, to copy the memo,” Kantor thinks. So she does so before he returns, and the memo would be quoted in the third paragraph of Kantor and Twohey’s first Weinstein story."
posted by Iris Gambol at 4:37 PM on March 11, 2020 [15 favorites]

Are there any crimes that can be prosecuted against the other people in the mix here - the ones who aided Weinstein in his cover-ups, the bribery/hush money, the intimidation... any actual crimes, or just disgustingly awful ethics? Because I'd like to see the whole thing come down.
posted by tzikeh at 7:20 PM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

I wish he was younger so he could stay in prison for longer. Unfortunately I think he’ll die there before he serves out his full sentence.
posted by Jubey at 7:28 PM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

Harvey Weinstein stunned courtroom with bizarre rant before sentencing

Who's next?

Weinstein’s 23-year sentence is a shot heard round legal world - "'These beautiful, high-profile women were probably the only ones with enough credibility and social power to get this going', said Louise Fitzgerald, who specializes in the psychological effects of sexual harassment. 'Will a waitress who's a single mom get the same attention? Will a Hispanic farm worker raped by her supervisor have the same credibility?'"
posted by kliuless at 9:54 PM on March 11, 2020 [6 favorites]

"...have the same credibility?'" "

No they won't. Not in this World. But they'll have more than they did.
posted by aleph at 10:25 PM on March 11, 2020 [1 favorite]

can some years be added on for this bullshit as an aggravating factor

Weinstein said he felt "remorse for this situation." But he also argued that men are being accused of "things that none of us understood."
[...]
"I'm totally confused. I think men are confused about these issues."
[...]
Weinstein said his "empathy has grown" since his downfall, and said that his new "mission is to help people."
[...]
Weinstein said he "really really had that impression that I had that feeling, that I had that relationship [...] I had wonderful times with these people," he said.

posted by away for regrooving at 10:42 PM on March 11, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm glad that he was convicted on at least some of the charges. But also, I believe Annabella Sciorra.
posted by Zonker at 3:40 AM on March 12, 2020 [4 favorites]

I'm assuming they can appeal? Is this not so? The 23 years is great, but not so much if he never goes to prison at all.
posted by tzikeh at 9:15 AM on March 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

He will likely appeal, but he is unlikely to get bail during his appeal because of the seriousness of the first degree crimes for which he was convicted. He's already in jail or bouncing between the hospital and jail.
posted by JackFlash at 9:37 AM on March 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

He still has a lot of money, he's a flight risk.
posted by rhizome at 1:21 PM on March 12, 2020 [1 favorite]

Regardless of whether he appeals, there's a huge plus to having someone as high-profile as he is at Riker's Island right now: when he gets coronavirus, the news will suddenly care about the unsanitary conditions of our jails and prisons.

This will be the most useful he's ever been in his life.
posted by bile and syntax at 2:22 PM on March 18, 2020 [5 favorites]

they moved him upstate so he's back to being worthless garbage
posted by poffin boffin at 6:12 PM on March 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

when he gets coronavirus

At New York prison, Harvey Weinstein put in isolation after contracting virus (Joe Mahoney, Niagara Gazette, 22 Mar 2020)

Oscar-winning movie producer Harvey Weinstein, now one of New York's most notorious prison inmates after being sentenced for sexual assault, has tested positive for the COVID-19 virus, according to officials connected to the state prison system.

Weinstein, who turned 68 last Thursday is being isolated at Wende Correctional Facility in Western New York, officials told CNHI Sunday.

He is one of two Wende inmates who have tested positive, the officials said.

posted by Not A Thing at 3:17 PM on March 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Jeffrey Epstein and Trump have proven that his test might not be on the up and up, whether taken by jail doctors or his own. Of course prisons and jails are not a good place to be for social distancing, but we don't know that he doesn't have Manafort-level comfort. I think rape is classified as a violent crime, so he may indeed be in (or close to) the general population.
posted by rhizome at 4:50 PM on March 22, 2020

I wonder if his appeal will be delayed until after the isolation period.
Then agsin, I have a friend who has some kids and of job in the New York State courts whose workplace is closed until further notice, so maybe any appeal would have been delayed anyway.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 6:11 PM on March 22, 2020