NEW YORK – The overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s New York sex crimes conviction on April 25 may feel like a shocking reversal, but the criminal case against him has been fragile since the day it was filed.

Prosecutors moved it forward with risky, boundary-pushing bets. New York’s top judges, many of them female, have held rounds of pained debates over whether his conviction was clean.

Outside the justice system, evidence of Weinstein’s sexual misconduct is overwhelming.

After The New York Times revealed allegations of abuse by the producer in 2017, nearly 100 women came forward with accounts of pressure and manipulation by Weinstein. Their stories sparked the global #MeToo reckoning.

But while Weinstein’s alleged victims could fill an entire courtroom, few of them could stand at the centre of a New York criminal trial.

Many of the horror stories were about sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one.

Others fell beyond the statute of limitations. One of the original accusers was dropped from the trial because of allegations of police misconduct.

Manhattan prosecutors, under pressure for not pursuing charges earlier, made a series of gambles.

First, they proceeded with a trial based on only two victims, who accused him of sexually assaulting them but also admitted to having consensual sex with him at other times – a combination that many experts say is too messy to win convictions.

To prove their case against Weinstein, who denies all allegations of non-consensual sex, the prosecutors had little concrete evidence.

So to persuade the jury, the lawyers turned to a controversial strategy that would ultimately lead to the conviction’s undoing. They put additional women with accounts of abuse by Weinstein – so-called Molineux witnesses – on the stand to establish a pattern of predation.

The decision seemed apt for the moment: In a legal echo of the #MeToo movement, Weinstein was forced to face a chorus of testimony from multiple women.

The women’s testimony was searing, and when Weinstein was convicted in 2020, and then sentenced to 23 years in prison, it looked like the prosecutors had expanded the possibilities for holding sex offenders accountable.

Ms Dawn Dunning, who served as a supporting witness in the trial, said in an interview afterwards: “I did it for all of us.

“I did it for the women who couldn’t testify. I couldn’t not do it.”

Unfair to whom?

But the move also risked violating a cardinal rule of criminal trials: Defendants must be judged only on the acts they are being charged with.

That became the main basis for Weinstein’s repeated appeals against his conviction.

For years, his lawyers have argued that his trial was fundamentally unfair, because it included witnesses who fell outside the scope of the charges.

In addition to the alleged sexual assault victims, prosecutors brought in character witnesses who portrayed Weinstein as a capricious, cruel figure.

In 2022, a New York appeals court dismissed those concerns and upheld his conviction, after a vigorous debate by the judges.

They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends”, but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him”.

In February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s latest and final appeal, the proceedings did not garner much attention. But they felt quietly dramatic: Seven of the state’s highest judges, four of them women, were debating whether the man whose alleged offences formed the cornerstone of the #MeToo movement had been treated fairly in court.

On April 25, the court decided, with a majority that included three female judges, to throw out the conviction and order a new trial. Weinstein remains convicted in California and will be moved to prison there.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the judges wrote in their decision on April 25.

“No person accused of illegality may be judged on proof of uncharged crimes that serve only to establish the accused’s propensity for criminal behaviour,” the opinion continued.

But the decision landed by the slimmest of majorities: four to three, with stinging dissents.

Judge Madeline Singas wrote: “Fundamental misunderstandings of sexual violence perpetrated by men known to, and with significant power over, the women they victimise are on full display in the majority’s opinion.”

Reached by phone a few minutes after the court shared its decision, Ms Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Weinstein, was unwavering in her own judgment.

“That is unfair to survivors,” she said of the ruling.

“We still live in our truth,” she added. “And we know what happened.” NYTIMES