Former Hollywood movie producer and convicted sex offender Harvey Weinstein was hospitalized after an "alarming blood test result,” his lawyer said late Monday. Weinstein’s attorney Imran Ansari told AFP via email that the 72-year-old was taken to a New York hospital for "emergent treatment due to an alarming blood test result that requires immediate medical attention.” He will remain at the hospital "until his condition stabilizes,” his lawyer added. US media reported in October that Weinstein was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer.
The disgraced producer, who is currently serving a prison sentence at the notorious Rikers Island prison, "has been suffering from a lack of adequate medical care and enduring deplorable and inhumane conditions,” Ansari said. In the same email, Weinstein’s spokesman Juda Engelmayer said his client "is suffering from a number of illnesses, including leukemia” and "has been deprived the medical attention that someone in his medical state deserves, prisoner or not.” "In many ways, this mistreatment constitutes cruel and unusual punishment,” Engelmayer added.
Weinstein had previously been hospitalized in September for emergency heart surgery before being reincarcerated. The co-founder of Miramax Films is due to be retried in New York in 2025, after an appeals court last year reversed the ruling of his 2020 sentence for raping an actress, Jessica Mann, and sexually assaulting a production assistant, Mimi Haleyi. The trial was due to begin in November, but has since been delayed.
Weinstein has appeared in court several times due to the proceedings, most recently in October, during which he arrived in a wheelchair, pale and visibly diminished. Prosecutors in New York, meanwhile, have since charged him in a separate sexual assault case from 2006, to which Weinstein pleaded not guilty and attorneys requested a separate trial. The next hearing in the case is set for January 29, during which a new trial date will be set for all charges.
Although Weinstein’s conviction in New York was overturned, he remains incarcerated for a separate 16-year prison sentence issued in 2023 by a court in Los Angeles for additional rape and sexual assault charges. In 2017, the allegations against Weinstein helped launch the #MeToo movement, a watershed moment for women fighting sexual misconduct. More than 80 women accused him of harassment, sexual assault or rape, including prominent actors Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd. Weinstein has claimed that any sexual relations in question were consensual. — AFP