A California appeals court on Friday unanimously upheld Harvey Weinstein's 2022 rape and sexual assault conviction, rejecting the disgraced Hollywood mogul's bid to overturn the jury's guilty verdicts. But the three-judge panel also found that the 74-year-old must be resentenced after the trial judge improperly relied on since-overturned New York convictions when handing down a 16-year prison term.
The ruling from California's 2nd District Court of Appeal leaves Weinstein right where he has been, behind bars, while stripping away the specific sentence that put him there. It is a mixed outcome that his legal team is already framing as a partial win, even as the conviction itself stands firm.
The panel found no violation of Weinstein's constitutional rights during the trial. The Hill reported that the court ordered resentencing because the Los Angeles trial judge had partially relied on Weinstein's New York convictions, convictions later thrown out due to what has been described as "egregious" judicial errors, as an aggravating factor when imposing the original sentence.
Weinstein was convicted in 2022 of one count of rape and two counts of sexual assault against Evgeniya Chernyshova, stemming from an incident at the 2013 LA Italia Film Festival. The AP reported that the appeals panel was direct in its rejection of Weinstein's arguments, writing: "We reject his attempts to disturb the jury's guilty verdicts."
David Ring, an attorney for Chernyshova, told the AP that his client "has persevered for years to reach this point against the man who raped her."
The ruling's language left little ambiguity about the conviction itself. Newsmax reported that the panel wrote: "The sentence is vacated and the matter is remanded for re-sentencing. In all other respects, the judgment is affirmed."
That distinction matters. Weinstein's team had sought to throw out the guilty verdicts entirely, not just the sentence. The court refused. The conviction for raping an actress in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2013 remains intact.
Courts across the country have continued to deliver firm sentences in high-profile criminal cases, as seen when former "Dances With Wolves" actor Nathan Chasing Horse received a life sentence for sexual assault.
The resentencing order traces back to a separate legal debacle in New York. Weinstein's earlier New York conviction was overturned, a decision rooted in what courts characterized as serious judicial errors during that trial. When the Los Angeles judge sentenced Weinstein to 16 years, the judge treated those New York convictions as an aggravating factor justifying a harsher penalty.
Once New York's courts threw out those convictions, the foundation under part of the California sentence collapsed. The appeals panel recognized this and ordered the trial judge to resentence Weinstein without leaning on the discredited New York verdicts.
The Washington Times reported that Weinstein's appeal had also argued that testimony from a film festival head was unfairly limited at trial, but the court rejected that claim and denied the request for a new trial.
What Weinstein's new sentence will look like remains an open question. The original 16-year term cannot stand as issued, but nothing in the ruling prevents the trial judge from imposing a significant sentence on other grounds.
Weinstein spokesperson Juda Engelmayer issued a statement to the Associated Press expressing disappointment while seizing on the resentencing order:
"We are disappointed by today's decision and respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeal's conclusions regarding the fairness of Mr. Weinstein's trial. At the same time, the court correctly recognized that his sentence cannot stand."
Engelmayer made clear the legal fight is far from over, as the New York Post reported:
"This is not the end of the appellate process. We intend to seek review in the California Supreme Court because we continue to believe significant legal errors affected the proceedings and warrant further review."
The strategy is plain. Weinstein's lawyers will push the case up to the California Supreme Court, hoping that a higher bench will find what the three-judge panel did not, a constitutional defect serious enough to unravel the conviction. Whether the state's highest court agrees to take the case is another matter entirely.
Weinstein's legal situation in New York has been its own grinding saga. His original New York conviction was overturned, leading to retrials that produced two hung juries in the rape case. The day before the California ruling, New York prosecutors dropped yet another case against Weinstein after his accuser said she could not endure another trial.
That decision removed one charge from the board but did not clear Weinstein's New York docket. He remains convicted of a separate sexual felony in New York, the sexual assault of former "Project Runway" assistant Miriam Haley, as Breitbart reported. Sentencing in that case is expected in September, with prosecutors seeking a 20-year prison term.
If that sentence comes through anywhere near what prosecutors want, Weinstein, already 74, would almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison, regardless of what happens at resentencing in California.
The justice system has shown a willingness to impose lengthy sentences in serious criminal cases. An Oregon man who shot at three police officers during a traffic stop drew a 20-year sentence, and courts have not hesitated to deliver decades-long terms when the facts demand it.
The California appeals court ruling is neither the total victory Weinstein wanted nor the clean resolution prosecutors might have preferred. The conviction holds. The sentence does not. And the legal process grinds forward on two coasts.
For Weinstein's victims, the core finding is what counts: a unanimous panel said the jury got it right. The evidence supported the guilty verdicts. No constitutional rights were trampled in the trial itself. The resentencing is a procedural consequence of New York's own judicial failures, not a reflection on the strength of the California case.
High-profile criminal convictions have continued to hold up under scrutiny in courtrooms across the country, including cases like the conviction of actor Nick Pasqual for attempted murder in the stabbing of a Hollywood makeup artist.
Weinstein's legal team will keep filing. That is their right. But the appellate court's language, "We reject his attempts to disturb the jury's guilty verdicts", does not leave much room for optimism on their end.
The broader question now is whether the resentencing process will produce a meaningfully different outcome, or whether the trial judge, stripped of the New York aggravating factors, arrives at a similar number through other evidence. The California case involved a rape conviction and two sexual assault counts. That is not a thin record.
Meanwhile, celebrity criminal cases continue to produce serious consequences. Matthew Perry's personal assistant was sentenced to more than three years for administering the fatal ketamine injection that killed the actor, a reminder that fame does not insulate anyone from accountability.
Harvey Weinstein spent years wielding enormous power in Hollywood. He used it, by the jury's finding, to commit rape and sexual assault. The appeals court just told him the conviction stands. His lawyers can file all the way to the California Supreme Court, but the facts found by twelve jurors are not going anywhere.
Accountability does not require a perfect process. It requires a just verdict, and this one survived its first serious test.
