Half a century after turning Hollywood and Manhattan into his playground to rape and pillage, Harvey Weinstein finally faced the criminal justice system and lost. Of five criminal charges, the disgraced producer was found guilty on two: criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape in the third degree.
Weinstein escaped the most serious of the charges, predatory sexual assault and first-degree rape, but his conviction marks a cultural bellwether, proving that the #MeToo movement isn’t just a hashtag. It’ll put the once most powerful producer on the planet behind bars for at least half a decade, proof that though the justice system has always bent for the powerful, the mass unsilencing of victims has the power to break a network of predation.
Weinstein is a rapist. Those are the words journalists have spent more than three years waiting to write without that wretched “allegedly,” words that his victims have spent decades waiting for the justice system to validate. From Hillary Clinton to NBC News, every apparatchik of the elite rallied to silence the journalists and victims hoping to hold Weinstein to account as recently as 2017. Going from top Democratic donor and toast of Tinseltown to prison inmate is quite the fall, especially considering that half of the nation’s top tax bracket knew he spent his nights raping women for sport.
“I’m Harvey Weinstein,” the producer used to tell those in his way. “You know what I can do.” And thanks to the survivors brave enough to speak up and the rogue journalists bold enough to believe them, we do. We know he hired a spy organization staffed by ex-Mossad agents to dig up dirt on reporters and his victims, and we know that he explicitly did so either to cajole or outright threaten them into silence. We know that he blackmailed NBC News into shutting down investigations into his rapes by threatening to expose one of the outlet’s own serial predators, Matt Lauer.
We know it wasn’t enough for him to rape a victim once. After Weinstein broke into Annabella Sciorra’s apartment and raped her, he continued to stalk her across the planet, attempting to break into one of her hotel rooms in London and then another in Cannes. Sciorra, whose testimony helped the jury decide to convict Weinstein, slept with a baseball bat next to her bed for 20 years after the attack. Tonight, she will not need to.
Weinstein, of course, has learned nothing. His entire defense rested on following the same old tricks he’s used for decades: slut-shame, discredit, rinse, and repeat. But now, his worst fear has been realized. For once, he’ll have to read a world-famous story that he didn’t get to make up.
Weinstein is a rapist. And thus goes his legacy.
