Harvey Weinstein found guilty in sexual assault and rape case

Matt Damon once compared him to a scorpion and said that it is his nature to sting people. Meryl Streep, accepting an award for best actress in 2012

New Delhi: Harvey Weinstein’s career in the movie business has risen and fallen as for his famous temper. Long before Weinstein faced harassment and assault charges from scores of women he worked with over the years, and before he was the symbolic villain of the #MeToo movement paying top-dollar to fend off rape charges, Weinstein was busy defending himself from something much more ordinarily Hollywood: the notion he was a gigantic jerk.

Matt Damon once compared him to a scorpion and said that it is his nature to sting people. Meryl Streep, accepting an award for best actress in 2012.

At the time Weinstein was one of the most powerful men in Hollywood as co-founder of Miramax and the Weinstein Company and as the producer of some of the earlier decade’s top movies. He was a kingmaker helping to shape the careers of top directors like Quentin Tarantino and A-listers like Gwyneth Paltrow. He could make careers, and he could break them.

The New York Times and the New Yorker that exposed decades of sexual harassment and assault allegations against him, and culminated this year in a criminal trial in New York saw Weinstein becomes a virtual untouchable – toxic to most of those who formerly feted him with a surname that has become a byword for abuse, not Oscars.

Weinstein is unlikely to ever return to the top. That’s according even to people whose job it is to redeem the reputation of the seemingly irredeemable

67-year- old, guilty on two counts, rape in the third degree and criminal sexual act in the first degree. He was found not guilty on two counts of predatory sexual assault and one count of rape in the first degree.

Weinstein, who was previously out on bond, will remain in jail until his sentencing on March 11.