Hollywood’s fallen king Harvey Weinstein has been rushed to hospital for emergency heart surgery in New York, where the 72-year-old former producer is being held in jail awaiting a retrial in November on rape and sexual assault charges, ABC News reported Monday.
“Mr. Weinstein was rushed to Bellevue Hospital last night due to numerous medical symptoms,” his spokespeople said in a statement obtained by the network, “confirming a heart procedure and surgery,” but without saying more.
The former American producer had already been hospitalized at the end of April in New York, just after the resounding cancellation of a first conviction in 2020 for rape.
His representatives stressed that their client suffers from “a plethora of significant health problems that require medical monitoring” while the septuagenarian is incarcerated in the notorious Rikers Island prison in New York.
He is due to appear in court in the city on Thursday for a new procedural hearing after Manhattan federal prosecutors presented new evidence of sexual assaults in the 2000s to a grand jury – citizens who participate in the investigative phase with the prosecutor – in early September.
Mr. Weinstein could thus be charged again at the end of the week.
It was during a hearing in July in New York, during which, pushed in a wheelchair, he appeared physically diminished, that a new trial was set for November 12.
Harvey Weinstein had benefited at the end of April from a ruling by a New York appeals court overturning his 2020 conviction for the 2013 rape of an actress, Jessica Mann, and the 2006 sexual assault of a production assistant, Mimi Haleyi.
A turnaround seen as an affront and a step backwards for the #MeToo movement, launched with the Weinstein affair, against sexual and sexist violence against women.
The revelations in 2017 about the sexual assaults of the former boss of Miramax had triggered a global shockwave and freed the speech of many victims. More than 80 women accused him of harassment, sexual assault or rape, including Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd.
Harvey Weinstein has always maintained that sex was consensual.
Despite the overturning of the New York verdict, he is being held for a 2023 sentencing in Los Angeles, with a 16-year prison sentence for other rape and sexual assault cases.
