Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist currently serving a 23-year prison sentence in New York, was charged Friday with six more counts of sexual assault by Los Angeles prosecutors. The charges are three counts of rape and three counts of forcible oral copulation, the Associated Press reports. Altogether the 11 charges he faces in L.A. carry a maximum sentence of 140 years in prison.
The California charges were pursued by the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office. Two charges stem from an allegation that Weinstein raped a woman at a hotel in Beverly Hills between September 2004 and September 2005. The four other charges stem from an allegation that he raped a different woman on two separate occasions between November 2009 and November 2010 at a Beverly Hills hotel.
Weinstein, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than 80 women and has long denied all claims of nonconsensual acts, has not changed his tune regarding these charges. Juda Engelmayer, Weinstein’s spokesman, said as much in a statement to the AP, noting his client “has always maintained that every one of his physical encounters throughout his entire life have been consensual. That hasn’t changed. At this moment we cannot comment on the additional charges until we learn more about them.”
The new charges follow Weinstein’s high-profile trial in New York, where in February he was found guilty of a criminal sexual act in the first degree and rape in the third degree. The trial was the first legal referendum on Weinstein’s Hollywood downfall, which triggered the broader, renewed #MeToo movement and an industry-wide reckoning regarding sexual misconduct. Weinstein is currently serving time in an upstate New York prison; he contracted coronavirus in March while imprisoned but has since recovered, according to his spokesman.
Weinstein’s California charges are being pursued by a task force that tackles sexual misconduct in the entertainment industry, assembled by Los Angeles district attorney Jackie Lacey in 2018. As the AP notes, the task force had made little headway until this year, more recently bringing charges against adult-film star Ron Jeremy and producer David Guillod. (Jeremy has previously denied accusations of sexual assault, though he has not commented publicly on the case; Guillod’s spokesperson has denied the allegations, saying the producer “looks forward to clearing his name.”) The D.A.’s office, which first brought charges against Weinstein in January, is attempting to extradite Weinstein to the West Coast, but that effort has been delayed by restrictions due to the ongoing pandemic.
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