Harvey Weinstein Sentenced to 15 Years for 2006 Assault After a Six-Year Legal Odyssey
Weinstein, 74, appeared in a wheelchair with his hands cuffed to his seat. "It is a life sentence for me," survivor Miriam Haley told the court. The judge said he "never accepted responsibility."
Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Manhattan on Wednesday for sexually assaulting former "Project Runway" production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006, the latest chapter in a legal saga that has kept the former Hollywood mogul behind bars since his 2018 arrest helped ignite the #MeToo movement.
Weinstein, 74, appeared in the downtown courtroom in a wheelchair, his hands cuffed to his seat. Judge Curtis Farber ordered that the prison term be followed by five years of supervised release and that Weinstein register as a sex offender.
"You took what you wanted by force, and you have never accepted responsibility," Farber told him before handing down the sentence.
In a victim impact statement read aloud in court, Haley said Weinstein "abused his position and power," with a "devastating effect on my life and security." "It is a life sentence for me," she said. Weinstein addressed the court as well, again denying the allegations while apologizing to "anyone I may have hurt by my actions." "I am not a perfect person," he said, "but I am a person who has made mistakes." He later added: "I am not a violent man." He is expected to appeal.
"Today was about the survivors," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement. "I'm moved, as we should all be moved, by their courage and their steadfastness through what has obviously been a challenging process."
The sentence caps more than six years of trials and appeals. Weinstein was first convicted in New York in 2020 of third-degree rape involving aspiring actor Jessica Mann and a first-degree criminal sexual act involving Haley, and was sentenced to 23 years. New York's highest court overturned that conviction in 2024 and ordered a new trial. In June 2025, a second jury again convicted him of the first-degree criminal sexual act against Haley, who testified that he forcibly performed oral sex on her in his New York City apartment in 2006. The same jury acquitted him of a separate charge involving former model Kaja Sokola and deadlocked on the charge involving Mann. A third trial on the Mann count also ended in a hung jury, and in late June prosecutors declined to try it a fourth time.
Weinstein faces a separate case in California, where a Los Angeles jury convicted him in December 2022 of rape and two counts of sexual assault involving an Italian actor and model in 2013. He was sentenced to 16 years in that case in February 2023, but an appeals court vacated the sentence and he is due to be resentenced.
More than 80 women have accused Weinstein of sexual assault or harassment. He insists every encounter was consensual. His health has declined sharply in recent years, with diagnoses including bone marrow cancer, kidney disease and diabetes, and he has been held in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital, where he will remain until he is transferred to a state prison.
Weinstein once dominated independent film. His Miramax label released "Clerks" and "Pulp Fiction," he won an Oscar as a producer of "Shakespeare in Love," and his later company won back-to-back best picture awards for "The King's Speech" and "The Artist." His reign ended in 2017, when The New York Times and The New Yorker published investigations detailing decades of alleged harassment and assault.
