Harvey Weinstein is scheduled to be arraigned in Manhattan on Wednesday on a new indictment alleging up to three sex crimes, his lawyer said.
Weinstein's lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said the jailed former movie mogul would appear in court in person to face the new legal hurdle after being excused from last week's hearing because he was recovering from emergency heart surgery.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office announced last week at a hearing on September 12 that a grand jury had returned a new indictment charging Weinstein with previously uncharged crimes.
The indictment, which will remain secret until Weinstein's arraignment, prosecutors said the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults: at the TriBeCa Grand Hotel (now known as the Roxy Hotel) and a residential building in Lower Manhattan in the mid-2000s, and at a TriBeCa hotel in May 2016.
Meanwhile, Weinstein is awaiting a retrial in his landmark #MeToo case after the New York State Supreme Court overturned his 2020 conviction earlier this year.
Weinstein's retrial is scheduled to begin on November 12. Prosecutors have said they will seek to include new charges in the retrial, but Weinstein's legal team has opposed this, arguing it should be a separate case.
Aidala noted last week that because the indictment remains unsealed, it is unclear whether the new charges relate to some or all of the additional allegations heard by the grand jury.
“We don't know anything,” the defendant said outside court last week. “We don't know the exact charges, we don't know the exact location, we don't know the time.”
Weinstein has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
He remains in a Manhattan hospital after undergoing emergency surgery on September 9 to drain fluid from around his heart and lungs.
A judge ruled last week to allow Weinstein, 72, to remain indefinitely in the prison ward at Bellevue Hospital instead of being transferred to the medical unit at the city's Rikers Island prison complex.
In April, a New York appeals court ruled that in vacating Weinstein's conviction and ordering a new trial, the judge improperly allowed testimony against him based on allegations from other women unrelated to the cases.
Once one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, Weinstein co-founded the film and television production companies Miramax and The Weinstein Company, producing films such as “Shakespeare in Love” and “The Crying Game.”
