Tainted Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was arrested on Friday on rape, criminal sex act and other charges from encounters with two women, police said on Friday as he faced the first criminal case stemming from misconduct claims that scores of women made against him.
Seven months after the allegations destroyed his career and set off a national reckoning known as the #MeToo movement, Weinstein (66) left a Manhattan police station in handcuffs, with a strained smile, to head to court for arraignment.
Besides the rape and criminal sex act charges, Weinstein also was arrested on lower-level sex abuse and sexual misconduct charges, the New York Police Department said.
Weinstein turned himself in at the police station early Friday.
A law enforcement official told the Associated Press that the criminal sex act charge stemmed from a 2004 encounter between Weinstein and Lucia Evans, a then-aspiring actor who has said he forced her to perform oral sex on him in his office. She was among the first women to speak out about him.
The rape charge relates to a woman who has not spoken publicly or been identified, according to the official.
Weinstein’s attorney, Benjamin Brafman, declined to comment when first contacted about the charges late Thursday, but had said that Weinstein has consistently denied any allegations of “nonconsensual sex.”
Evans confirmed to The New Yorker that she was pressing charges. “At a certain point, you have to think about the greater good of humanity, of womankind,” she told the magazine.
Evans told The New Yorker in a story published in October that Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex during a daytime meeting at his New York office in 2004, the summer before her senior year at Middlebury College.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance had been under enormous public pressure to bring a criminal case against Weinstein. Some women’s groups, including Hollywood activist group Time’s Up, accused the Democrat of being too deferential to Weinstein and too dismissive of his accusers.
A grand jury has been hearing evidence in the case for weeks.
In March, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo took the extraordinary step of ordering the State’s attorney general to investigate whether Mr. Vance acted properly in 2015 when he decided not to prosecute Weinstein over a previous allegation of unwanted groping, made by an Italian model. That investigation is in its preliminary stages.
Multiple accusations
More than 75 women have accused Weinstein of wrongdoings around the globe. Several actors and models accused him of criminal sexual assaults, but many of the encounters happened too long ago for any prosecution. Actor Rose McGowan said Weinstein raped her in 1997 in Utah, “Sopranos” actor Annabella Sciorra said he raped her in her New York apartment in 1992 and Norwegian actor Natassia Malthe said he attacked her in a London hotel room in 2008.
McGowan told the AP on Thursday that she was gratified but “still in shock” that Weinstein was expected to surrender.
“The justice system has been something very elusive,” McGowan said. “I hope in this case it works. Because it’s all true. None of this was consensual.”
The statute of limitations for rape and certain other sex crimes in New York was eliminated in 2006, but not for attacks that happened prior to 2001.
New York City police detectives said in early November that they were investigating allegations by another accuser, “Boardwalk Empire” actor Paz de la Huerta, who told police in October that Weinstein raped her twice in 2010. She is not one of the victims in the case on Friday; her's was still pending, officials said.
Authorities in California and London also are investigating assault allegations. Britain has no statute of limits on rape cases; some of the allegations under investigation there date to the 1980s.
