Harvey Weinstein CBE (born March 19, 1952) is an American former film producer. He and his brother Bob Weinstein co-founded the entertainment company Miramax, which produced several successful independent films, including Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), The Crying Game (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Heavenly Creatures (1994), Flirting with Disaster (1996), and Shakespeare in Love (1998).
Weinstein won an Academy Award for producing Shakespeare in Love, and garnered seven Tony Awards for a variety of plays and musicals, including The Producers, Billy Elliot the Musical, and August: Osage County. After leaving Miramax, Weinstein and his brother Bob founded The Weinstein Company, a mini-major film studio. He was co-chairman, alongside Bob, from 2005 to 2017.
Justice James Burke has a reputation as a tough sentencer, especially when cases go to trial. He more than earned that reputation on Wednesday, ordering Harvey Weinstein to serve 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault.
Weinstein’s defense lawyers were aghast, calling the sentence “obscene” and “cowardly.” In the New York legal community, many expected that he would get something in the mid-teens. “It was an extraordinarily lengthy sentence for someone who had committed his first criminal offense,” said Paul Callan, a lawyer and legal commentator for CNN. “I’m not sure how an appellate court will react to this particular situation.
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