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9th September 2024
08:42pm BST
Harvey Weinstein has been rushed to hospital for emergency hearth surgery, his lawyer has said according to BBC News.
Arthur Aidala, the lawyer of the disgraced film producer, said that Weinstein was taken from Risker Island Jail to Bellevue hospital on Monday morning.
Aidala provided no further details.
Weinstein's lawyers say the film tycoon has been subject to multiple health conditions in recent times and has experienced chest pains.
Weinstein has diabetes and high blood pressure while also suffered from covid-19 and double pneumonia over the summer.
The 72-year-old is a convicted sex offender and is due to appear in court this week in the lead up to a retrial after the overturning in April of his rape conviction that saw him sentenced to 23 years in prison in 2020.
In February 2023 Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to another 16 years in prison.
The disgraced movie mogul was handed the sentence by a Los Angeles judge after being convicted on three charges of rape and sexual assault.
According to a report by the BBC at the time, Weinstein begged the court: “Please don’t sentence me to life in prison,” the disgraced Hollywood star told the court.
“I don’t deserve it.”
Weinstein was convicted of sexually assaulting former production assistant Mimi Haleyi in 2006 and raping Jessica Mann, a former aspiring actress, in 2013.
Weinstein, once one of the most inarguably powerful men in Hollywood, was brought to trial in California on seven charges of rape and sexual assault involving four women between 2004 and 2013. The jury found him not guilty of one charge and could not decide about three others.
The producer was initially charged in Los Angeles on eleven counts of rape and sexual assault. However, by the time he went on trial, prosecutors had dropped four charges related to a woman identified in the case as “Jane Doe #5” because the state was “unable to proceed” with her allegations.
Allegations against Weinstein by dozens of women, including those published by The New York Times and The New Yorker in October 2017, were a driving force behind the #MeToo movement.
During his New York sentencing in March 2020, according to a report by NPR, Weinstein compared the #MeToo movement and his own situation to the Red Scare of the 1940s and ’50s, during which Hollywood professionals were blacklisted for their perceived support of communism.
