Harvey Weinstein was charged by a grand jury Monday with three new counts of sexual assault, raising the number of criminal charges against the disgraced Hollywood mogul to six.
Added to the list is one count of criminal sexual act in the first degree, plus two counts of felony predatory sexual assault, according to a news release from the office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. The latter is "a class A-II felony, which carries a minimum sentence of 10 years and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment."
Monday's news comes on the heels of an earlier indictment against Weinstein for two counts of rape and one count of criminal sexual act in the first degree. In total, the alleged incidents involve three women and span nearly a decade from 2004 to 2013.
Last month, the embattled film producer plead not guilty to those felony charges in court, and he posted bail of $1 million. Weinstein agreed not to travel outside of New York and Connecticut without advance permission from the court and also to wear a GPS-enabled monitoring ankle bracelet.
Only 13 out of 1,000 cases of sexual assault get referred to a prosecutor, according to the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN). Seven out of those 1,000 then receive a felony conviction. Rape cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute for a number of reasons, including a lack of witness evidence of the crime and jurors' own preconceived notions of what constitutes rape.
According to reporter Ronan Farrow, it was known within the Weinstein Company that the "mistreatment of women" was a "serial problem" that created a "culture of complicity." When the New York Times and the New Yorker published their exposés of Weinstein in October 2017, more than one dozen women claimed that Weinstein had made unwanted sexual advances in a list of allegations that spanned decades.
Those bombshell reports unleashed an avalanche of accusers who came forward against Weinstein and helped propel the #MeToo movement forward. As the allegations mounted, a pattern, detailed by Rolling Stone, emerged:
He invites a younger woman to his hotel room or apartment on a professional pretense, appears in a bathrobe or completely undressed, and requests a massage and/or sexual favors, either implicitly or explicitly offering the exchange for career advancement.
This begged the question: Could something have been done to stop Weinstein sooner? "Any time you have a story like this, where people are getting hurt over decades and decades, there are people around who knew enough and could have done more to stop it," Farrow, the reporter who wrote the New Yorker story, said in an interview for a Frontline documentary covering Weinstein.
Allegations led board members of the Weinstein Company to fire its namesake producer, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Weinstein to expel him from its ranks.
Monday's indictment pertains to an incident that allegedly happened with a third woman in 2006, according to Vance's office.
"A Manhattan Grand Jury has now indicted Harvey Weinstein on some of the most serious sexual offenses that exist under New York's penal law," Vance said. "This indictment is the result of the extraordinary courage exhibited by the survivors who have come forward."
Since October 2017, more than 80 women have come forward with allegations against Weinstein.
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