The district attorney’s office of Los Angeles presented this Monday four formal charges against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein for two sexual assaults committed allegedly in 2013. This is the second jurisdiction that gives this step, more than two years after tens of women accuse publicly Weinstein of sex crimes ranging from harassment to rape. The announcement comes the same day that Weinstein appear in a New York court in a lawsuit by two other sexual assaults.
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Up to now, the five charges brought by the prosecutor of New York were the ones that had been conducted after the wave of accusations against Weinstein, whose behavior spanning decades. The trial in Manhattan starting this Monday in the middle of a huge expectation to see Weinstein on the bench for the first time. It is expected to last about two months. The charges in Los Angeles, however, sealed the future medium-term producer. Even if it is acquitted in New York, you must be in Los Angeles to be processed again. On Monday it was not clear if the new process interferes with the trial in New York. The prosecutor’s office has set a bail of five million dollars.
The facts reported refer to two encounters with women in the days 18 and 19 February 2013. The two assaults happened on consecutive days and in hotel rooms in the Los Angeles area. According to the district attorney Jackey Lacey, the two alleged victims, told in their time to other people. After the scandal broke about the abuses of Weinstein in October 2017, the two cases were presented for prosecution. Most of the allegations against Weinstein were prescribed. In total, eight cases have been investigated in search of an angle to prosecute Weinstein. The other three could still result in charges.
The charges for these acts are rape by force, oral sex by force, penetration by force and retention force. If convicted, he faces 28 years in prison. In New York, during the preliminary phase of the process, the prosecution got him accused of “conduct predatory”, an aggravating factor that applies when we demonstrate a way of acting deliberately and continuously in time. Being convicted of this felony, She faces life imprisonment in New York.
Harvey Weinstein, one of the producers most successful in the history of Hollywood, “he used his power and influence to get closer to these women and then committed violent crimes against them,” said Lacey in a press conference in Los Angeles. “I want to applaud these victims that have stepped forward and have had the courage to tell what has happened to them”.
None of the women has been named in the charges. The los Angeles Times ensures that one of them is an Italian model who told her story in a very graphic way the police in 2017 and also in the newspaper. The other woman is one of the six who are going to testify in New York, and whose testimony he wants to use the accusation to prove the pattern of conduct of Weinstein.
