Harvey Weinstein Gets 15 Years For Sexual Assault of ‘Project Runway’ Staffer

Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to another 15 years in prison on Wednesday in what is likely to be his third and final sentencing in a long-running legal reckoning that has traced his fall from one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers to a convicted sex offender.

Addressing the court before Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Curtis J. Farber handed down the sentence, victim Mimi Haley said Weinstein “abused his position and power,” NBC News reported.

“It is a life sentence for me,” Haley said, referring to her sexual assault at the hands of Weinstein when she was an aspiring actress in 2006. She said the violent attack at Weinstein’s New York City apartment had a “devastating effect on my life and security.”

In his own address to the court, Weinstein again denied Haley’s allegations but said he was “not a perfect person.” Seated in a wheelchair, he then apologized to “anyone I may have hurt by my actions,” according to NBC News.

The latest twist in Weinstein’s sprawling, six-year legal saga follows his initial landmark #MeToo conviction in New York in 2020, a separate California conviction two years later, and the stunning reversal of his first conviction, a 2024 ruling that ultimately forced prosecutors to put him on trial two more times.

Weinstein, 74, has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 100 women, including actors Ashley Judd, Annabella Sciorra, Mira Sorvino, Salma Hayek, Rosanna Arquette, and Gwyneth Paltrow. His scores of accusers allege Weinstein used his immense Hollywood power and gatekeeping status to isolate, harass, and sexually assault vulnerable victims over his lengthy career.

Weinstein’s long-running legal battle involving four trials on two coasts traces back to the 2017 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposé helmed by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey that revealed he paid off sexual assault accusers for years. The blockbuster report helped unleash a wave of additional allegations and propelled the #MeToo movement into a global conversation about sexual abuse and power.

At Weinstein’s first trial in 2020, former Project Runway production assistant Mimi Haley gave harrowing testimony that Weinstein held her down on a bed at his Manhattan apartment and forcibly performed oral sex on her in 2006, when she was an aspiring actress. Another accuser, Jessica Mann, testified that Weinstein raped her at a New York hotel in 2013. Weinstein was initially convicted on charges involving both women and sentenced to 23 years in prison in March 2020.

But in a stunning reversal four years later, New York’s appeals court overturned the convictions, not because of anything involving Haley or Mann, but because it found the trial judge had improperly allowed extensive testimony about alleged “prior bad acts” that were not part of the charges. The court also found that Weinstein had been unfairly discouraged from testifying in his own defense by the prospect that prosecutors could cross-examine him about uncharged allegations.

The reversal immediately raised the prospect that Weinstein might go free, but he remained in custody due to his separate California conviction. A Los Angeles jury convicted him at a different trial in December 2022, and he was later sentenced to 16 years in prison the following February.

At the California trial, Weinstein faced allegations from four women. He was convicted of sexually assaulting Evgeniya Chernyshova, an Italian actor and model who testified that Weinstein arrived uninvited at her Los Angeles hotel room during a film festival in February 2013 and assaulted her after gaining entry.

The Los Angeles jury failed to reach verdicts on rape and forcible oral copulation charges involving Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and on a sexual battery charge involving Lauren Young, who testified that Weinstein assaulted her at the Montage Hotel in Beverly Hills when she was a 23-year-old aspiring actress. The judge declared mistrials on those counts. Weinstein was acquitted of sexually assaulting the massage therapist Juls Bindi at a Beverly Hills hotel in 2010.

With Weinstein remaining in custody on his Los Angeles conviction, Manhattan prosecutors pressed ahead with a new trial involving Haley and Mann in 2025. Jurors again found Weinstein guilty of sexually assaulting Haley but deadlocked on the rape charge involving Mann.

Prosecutors tried the Mann charge once more before a new jury, but that panel also failed to reach a unanimous verdict, resulting in another mistrial earlier this year. Prosecutors later said they would not pursue a fourth trial on the Mann allegation, citing her decision to move on with her life and not testify again.

“To be clear, we believe Ms. Mann’s account and her credibility as a witness,” the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office said in a statement. “This has been an extraordinarily taxing ordeal for her, and she has never wavered while testifying in front of two grand juries and three trial juries over the course of eight years. We thank her for her honesty and her tremendous bravery.”

Before his dramatic downfall, Weinstein wielded enormous power in Hollywood as a producer and studio chief whose companies backed and distributed a string of Oscar-winning films, including Shakespeare in Love, Good Will Hunting, Chicago, The King’s Speech, and Silver Linings Playbook.