Harvey Weinstein has begged a New York judge to hear the retrial in his landmark #MeToo case as soon as possible due to his deteriorating health, telling him: “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”
Weinstein has chronic myeloid leukaemia, diabetes and heart problems, and told the judge he was struggling amid harsh conditions at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex.
“Every day I’m at Rikers Island, it’s a mystery to me how I’m still walking,” he told the court in Manhattan. “I’m holding on because I want justice for myself and I want this to be over with.”
The 72-year-old is facing a retrial after his 2020 rape and sexual assault conviction involving two women was overturned by New York’s highest court in April last year. He has always maintained any sexual activity he was involved in was consensual.
At the hearing on Wednesday, Judge Curtis Farber said the retrial would start on 15 April.
However, Weinstein asked him to swap with another, unrelated case the judge has scheduled in March.
The disgraced movie mogul had arrived at the court in a wheelchair more than half an hour after the hearing’s scheduled start time. In court, he complained that jail officers had given him the wrong medication and failed to pick him up on time.
“I’m asking and begging you, your honour,” Weinstein said. He told the judge he was facing a “serious emergency situation” and wanted to “get out of this hellhole as quickly as possible”.
He told the court that at times he finds himself gasping for air and predicted he would soon need to be treated in hospital again.
In December, he was rushed to hospital following an “alarming blood test result”.
In court last week, Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala also appealed for the retrial to happen earlier in “the interest of humanity”, saying his client was “dying of cancer and is an innocent man right now in the state of New York”.
Judge Farber said he would look into starting the trial a few days earlier than planned if time allows, but the decision had been made following consultation with Weinstein’s lawyers as well as prosecutors.
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The judge also issued a key ruling on the retrial – upholding a separate charge based on an allegation from a woman who was not part of the original case.
Weinstein’s lawyers had tried to get the charge thrown out, arguing that prosecutors only brought it to bolster their case with a third accuser, but were unsuccessful.
Despite the New York conviction being overturned, he remains in custody due to another conviction in 2022, for the rape of an actress in Los Angeles in 2013. His lawyers have appealed that case.
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Weinstein was one of the most powerful people in Hollywood – the co-founder of film and television production companies Miramax and The Weinstein Company, he produced films such as the Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love, Pulp Fiction, and The Crying Game.
However, charges were brought after several women went public with allegations about him in 2017, fuelling the rise of the #MeToo movement.
In September last year, prosecutors in the UK dropped two charges of indecent assault brought against Weinstein in 2022, saying there was “no longer a realistic prospect of conviction”.
