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      The Offense That Harvey Weinstein Can Never Be Convicted Of

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      The movie producer won his appeal in New York on Thursday. But his story, at its core, is about work, and it can’t be measured by a criminal court.For the first time in years, there is a chance that Harvey Weinstein could walk free.His New York conviction for sex crimes was overturned on Thursday. Manhattan’s district attorney says he wants to retry Mr. Weinstein, but that seems, at most, a maybe. The former film producer still has a long sentence to serve in Los Angeles, though next month he is expected to appeal that conviction on grounds similar to those that were successful in New York. His lawyer is the same one who got Bill Cosby’s conviction tossed out.Many of Mr. Weinstein’s accusers say they are horrified. Even some of the seven judges who participated in the decision were outraged. The majority — ruling that his trial was unfair because it introduced witnesses separate from the central charges — prevailed by a single vote, 4 to 3. The dissenting judges described that decision as “oblivious,” “naïve” and “endangering decades of progress.” They have joined a roiling debate about what the standard of evidence in sex crimes trials should be.But criminal convictions have never seemed like the ultimate measure of Mr. Weinstein’s behavior. Whether he remains a felon or not, he can never be tried for the most overarching offense he is accused of.That is because, at its core, the Weinstein story — along with its greatest impact — is all about work.“A lot of these stories are about what’s been lost career-wise, and there’s no criminal remedy that is going to get at that,” Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law professor at Northwestern, said in an interview.Back when Mr. Weinstein was at the height of his power, he had many gifts as a producer. But where he stood above others was in his ability to make careers. He hired and molded Matt Damon, Michelle Williams, Jennifer Lawrence, Quentin Tarantino and some of the most successful producers working today. He invented the Oscar campaign as we know it. At those awards, he was thanked more often than God.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Can Weinstein’s Overturned New York Conviction Help Him Appeal California Case?

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      Harvey Weinstein faced similar sex crimes charges in New York and California, but the arguments used to overturn one case may not help in the other.The decision by New York’s top court on Thursday to overturn the conviction of Harvey Weinstein on sex crime charges raised many thorny legal questions. Perhaps chief among them: Will it bolster his chances of a successful appeal in a similar case in California?Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer in California, Jennifer Bonjean, plans to file that appeal next month, and has said she believes the New York decision helps her chances of winning. In both cases, prosecutors offered witnesses who said they had been assaulted by Mr. Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer, even though their accounts were not tied to criminal charges.Prosecutors in sexual assault cases sometimes use such witnesses to establish a pattern of behavior, but it can be a risky move because defendants are typically supposed to be judged only on the crimes with which they have been charged. The tactic was at the heart of the 4-to-3 decision on Thursday by New York’s Court of Appeals, which concluded that the judge who presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case in 2020 had deprived him of a fair trial by allowing those witnesses to testify.Mr. Weinstein is expected to appear in State Supreme Court in Manhattan on Wednesday for a procedural hearing that is the first step for prosecutors to restart the criminal case to try him again.New York and California law differ on the crucial issue of witnesses. The office of the Los Angeles district attorney, George Gascón, said that California’s law, unlike New York’s, allows evidence, at a judge’s discretion, that shows a defendant’s “propensity” to commit sexual assault.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      NYC School Crossing Guard Charged With Trying to Lure What He Thought Was Teen Into Sex

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      Jared Jeridore, who worked near a Queens school, was arrested after complaints about him led the police to have an officer pose as a teenage girl, officials said.A Queens man who worked as a school crossing guard was charged on Wednesday with attempted rape and other crimes after he tried to lure an undercover police officer he believed to be a 14-year-old girl into a sexual act, officials said.The charges against the man, Jared Jeridore, included attempted use of a child in a sexual performance, attempted dissemination of indecent material to minors and official misconduct, Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, said.“Young people need to be able to trust the adults who are charged with keeping them safe,” Ms. Katz said in a statement. “This defendant is accused of violating that trust with someone he thought was a teenager.”Mr. Jeridore, 24, of Jamaica, made an initial appearance before Judge Julieta Lozano of Queens Criminal Court on Wednesday. She ordered him to return to court in June. A lawyer for Mr. Jeridore did not immediately respond to a request for comment.School crossing guards are part-time Police Department employees who earn $18 an hour. Mr. Jeridore, who worked near a school in Jamaica, was suspended from his job after being arrested on Wednesday and subsequently resigned, a police spokeswoman said. It was unclear how long he had been a crossing guard.The undercover investigation began after underage individuals complained about Mr. Jeridore to the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, according to a criminal complaint.On the morning of March 28, the complaint says, an undercover officer posing as a 14-year-old girl met Mr. Jeridore at a Jamaica intersection about a block from a secondary school. The complaint does not name the school but lists an address that belongs to York Early College Academy.On April 18, the undercover officer and Mr. Jeridore exchanged Instagram screen names, according to the complaint. That afternoon, the complaint says, they walked together from the same intersection to a nearby bus stop, and Mr. Jeridore interlocked his arm with the officer’s.Around 11:30 that night, Mr. Jeridore and the officer had a video call, the complaint says. Mr. Jeridore, believing the officer was 14 and soon to turn 15, asked her to join him in a sex act, according to the complaint.Over the next several days, Mr. Jeridore sent messages via Instagram to a second officer who was posing as the first one, the complaint says. In the messages, he described the sexual interactions he hoped to have and sent the officer nude photos and sexually explicit video, according to the complaint.On Tuesday, the complaint says, Mr. Jeridore called the first undercover officer several times and asked her to meet him at a local hotel to have sex. Officers arrested Mr. Jeridore when he arrived, according to the complaint. More

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      Kathleen Hanna Reveals the Story of Her Life in ‘Rebel Girl’

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      The first draft of Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, “Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk,” was 600 pages long. As she worked to cut the manuscript, Hanna found herself excising page after page of male violence. “It’s pretty sad, if you read the book, because there’s still a lot in there,” she told me. “I had a joke with my editor about it.” Like, she’d already removed a rape and a kidnapping and a guy who threw a wine glass at her head! “What more do you want from me?”Hanna is super funny. When she takes the stage as the frontwoman of Bikini Kill, Le Tigre or the Julie Ruin, she plays a kind of punk trickster, shifting her voice to resemble a bratty Valley Girl, a demonic cheerleader, an obnoxious male fan. She is always subverting femininity and disarming bad guys with her spiky and irreverent lyrics. But when it came time to write her life story, she realized that she could not playfully twist away from her past.“I keep trying to make my rapes funny, but I have to stop doing that because they aren’t,” she writes in the book, which comes out on May 14.Kathleen Hanna at home with her dog, Terry. While writing her memoir, she was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder.OK McCausland for The New York Times“Rebel Girl” documents Hanna’s long career as an underground artist and musician, and its striking intersections with the mainstream. In the 1990s, she helped instigate the riot grrrl movement, calling girls to the front of punk venues and setting off a D.I.Y. feminist ethos that was later assimilated into a girl-power marketing trend. She was a friend of Kurt Cobain’s who scrawled the phrase “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” on his bedroom wall, inspiring the anthem that exploded into a global phenomenon.Nineties nostalgia applies an appealingly gritty filter to that era’s underground rock scene, but it could be punishing for those who stood in opposition to its white male standard. Hanna has sometimes worried that if she put it all out there, she would be disbelieved. “I’ve been told by men: Oh, you’re just the kind of woman these things happen to, as if I have some sort of smell I’m emanating,” she said. “But I knew that other women would understand.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Justice Dept. Nears $100 Million Settlement to Larry Nassar Victims Over FBI Failures

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      The deal, which could be announced in coming weeks, would bring an end to one of the last major cases stemming from a horrific sports scandal.The Justice Department is nearing a $100 million settlement over its initial failure to investigate Lawrence G. Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing girls under his care, according to people familiar with the situation.The deal, which could be announced in coming weeks, would bring an end to one of the last major cases stemming from a horrific sports scandal, with around 100 victims in line to receive compensation.The approach of a settlement comes two and a half years after senior F.B.I. officials publicly admitted that agents had failed to take quick action when U.S. national team athletes complained about Mr. Nassar to the bureau’s Indianapolis field office in 2015, when Mr. Nassar was a respected physician known for working with Olympians and college athletes. He has been accused of abusing more than 150 women and girls over the years.The broad outline of the deal is in place, but it has not yet been completed, according to several people with knowledge of the talks, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss continuing negotiations.The details of the settlement deal were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.It would be the latest in a series of big payouts that reflect the inability of institutions to protect hundreds of athletes — including the Olympic gold medalists Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney and Aly Raisman — from a doctor who justified his serial sexual abuse by claiming he was using unconventional treatments.In 2018, Michigan State University, which employed Mr. Nassar, paid more than $500 million into a victim compensation fund, believed to be the largest settlement by a university in a sexual abuse case. Three years later, U.S.A. Gymnastics and the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee reached a $380 million settlement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mary Ann Zielonko, Partner of Kitty Genovese, Dies at 85

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      The murder of Ms. Genovese, and her neighbors’ reaction to it, generated headlines. The nature of her relationship with Ms. Zielonko was a different story.For 60 years, Kitty Genovese has endured as a symbol of big-city apathy, the victim not only of a knife-wielding killer but also of her neighbors’ reluctance to get involved. Two weeks after a man named Winston Moseley stalked, raped and murdered her in Queens late at night in March 1964, a New York Times article reported that 38 of her neighbors had heard her cries for help, yet did nothing.That account turned out to be significantly flawed. Most of those 38 people were unaware of what was actually happening; they thought they were merely hearing a fight, perhaps a lovers’ quarrel. Investigations later determined that few of them had caught even a glimpse of the attacks. Nonetheless, the death of 28-year-old Catherine Susan Genovese has long remained a paradigm of urban anonymity and indifference.Kitty Genovese at work as a bar manager in an undated photo.New York Daily News, via Associated PressSomething else was out of kilter in the reporting back then. Ms. Genovese had been living for a year with Mary Ann Zielonko. In those days they were typically referred to as roommates. In fact, they were lovers. When the police investigators became aware of that, they questioned Ms. Zielonko as a possible suspect. After a night of bowling with friends, she had been asleep in their Kew Gardens apartment while the attack took place below.“I was very numb, I would say, from the whole thing,” she told Retro Report, a series of video documentaries exploring old news stories and their lasting effects, in 2016. “I felt, wow, she was so close, and I was sleeping, and I didn’t know what happened, and that I could have saved her. You know? That’s what I really think still.”Ms. Zielonko died on Wednesday at her home in Rutland, Vt., where she had lived since 2000. She was 85. Rebecca Jones, her domestic partner and sole survivor, said the cause was aspiration pneumonia.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      #MeToo Stalled in France. Judith Godrèche Might Be Changing That.

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      Judith Godrèche did not set out to relaunch the #MeToo movement in France’s movie industry.She came back to Paris from Los Angeles in 2022 to work on “Icon of French Cinema,” a TV series she wrote, directed and starred in — a satirical poke at her acting career that also recounts how, at the age of 14, she entered into an abusive relationship with a film director 25 years older than her.Then, a week after the show aired, in late December, a viewers’ message alerted her to a 2011 documentary that she says made her throw up and start shaking as if she were “naked in the snow.”There was the same film director, admitting that their relationship had been a “transgression” but arguing that “making films is a kind of cover” for forms of “illicit traffic.”She went to the police unit specialized in crimes against children — its waiting room was filled with toys and a giant teddy bear, she recalls — to file a report for rape of a minor.“There I was,” said Ms. Godrèche, now 52, “at the right place, where I’ve been waiting to be since I was 14.”Since then, Ms. Godrèche has been on a campaign to expose the abuse of children and women that she believes is stitched into the fabric of French cinema. Barely a week has gone by without her appearance on television and radio, in magazines and newspapers, and even before the French Parliament, where she demanded an inquiry into sexual violence in the industry and protective measures for children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Is Sean Combs the Subject of a Homeland Security Investigation?

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      The department has a division that often directs inquiries into sex trafficking allegations, like those cited in recent lawsuits against Mr. Combs.The raids of Sean Combs’s homes in Los Angeles and the Miami area this week raised a barrage of questions about the nature of the inquiry, which a federal official said was at least in part a human trafficking investigation.The government has said little about the basis for the search warrants, but the raids came after five civil lawsuits were filed against Mr. Combs in recent months that accused him of violating sex trafficking laws. In four of the suits women accused him of rape, and in one a man accused him of unwanted sexual contact. Mr. Combs, a hip-hop impresario known as Puff Daddy and Diddy who has been a high-profile figure in the music industry since the 1990s, has vehemently denied all of the allegations, calling them “sickening.” Officials have not publicly named him as a target of any prosecution.As the civil suits against Mr. Combs illustrate, the term human or sex trafficking has a broader meaning in the law than perhaps the more popularly understood image of organized crime and forced prostitution rings.“Traditionally you think of trafficking as a pimp who has a stable of victims and then is trafficking them in the traditional sense of the word, for money,” said Jim Cole, a former supervisory special agent with Homeland Security Investigations who oversaw human trafficking cases, “but there are lots of forms of trafficking.”The breadth of trafficking investigations has grown with the recent uptick in sexual abuse claims and the use of the internet by traffickers. Homeland Security Investigations often leads such criminal investigations, although the department is most commonly associated with immigration and transnational issues.In the current inquiry, federal investigators in New York have been interviewing potential witnesses about sexual misconduct allegations against Mr. Combs for several months, according to a person familiar with the interviews. Some of the questions involved the solicitation and transportation of prostitutes, as well as any payments or promises associated with sex acts, the person said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More