Harvey Weinstein

Harvey Weinstein
Born	19 March 1952 Flushing, Queens, New York
Nationality	American
Occupation	Film producer
Known for	Co-founder of Miramax; sexual assault convictions; client of Black Cube

Harvey Weinstein (born 19 March 1952) is an American film producer, co-founder with his brother Bob Weinstein of Miramax and later of the Weinstein Company. From the 1990s he was among the most powerful figures in independent film. In October 2017 the New York Times and the New Yorker published accounts of sexual assault and harassment by him going back decades. He was convicted in New York in 2020 and in Los Angeles in 2022. The New York conviction was set aside in 2024. A retrial in 2025 convicted him again of a criminal sexual act against Miriam Haley. On 23 September 2026 he was sentenced in Manhattan to 15 years. The California conviction stands, and an appeal court has ordered resentencing on the 16-year term. Before the 2017 stories ran, his lawyers hired Black Cube to stop them.

Career

He was born in Flushing, Queens, and grew up in Buffalo. He and Bob began as concert promoters and then as film distributors. They founded Miramax in 1979, named after their parents, Miriam and Max. The company became the principal American buyer of festival film. Disney bought it in 1993. The brothers left in 2005 and set up the Weinstein Company. The commercial power was his to cast, to cut and to decide which films were released. Judges in the later criminal cases described that power as the setting of the offences: a man who could decide whose career continued.

The cases

On 5 October 2017 the New York Times published Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s account. Five days later Ronan Farrow’s piece ran in the New Yorker. Dozens of women described assault or coercion, often in hotel rooms, often with a promise of work attached. The company collapsed. Public pressure led the Manhattan district attorney, then Cyrus Vance Jr, to charge him in 2018.

In February 2020 a New York jury convicted him of a criminal sexual act against Haley, a former production assistant, in his SoHo apartment in 2006, and of third-degree rape. He was sentenced to 23 years. He has pleaded not guilty throughout, and his lawyers have argued that the encounters were consensual. In April 2024 the New York Court of Appeals set the conviction aside, holding that the trial judge had allowed evidence of uncharged acts that prejudiced the jury. A retrial in 2025 convicted him again on the Haley count and acquitted him on a count involving Kaja Sokola. The jury deadlocked on a rape count involving Jessica Mann. On 12 June 2025 the judge declared a mistrial on that count. In June 2026 the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, dropped it and said the office would not seek a fourth trial. On 23 September 2026 Judge Curtis Farber sentenced him to 15 years on the Haley conviction. Prosecutors had asked for 20. The defence had asked for nine.

A Los Angeles jury convicted him in December 2022 of rape and sexual assault. The sentence was 16 years. In June 2026 a California appeal court upheld the conviction and ordered resentencing. The two sentences are separate. He has been held at Rikers Island during the New York proceedings.

Black Cube

In the year before the stories, his lawyers bought an operation to stop them. On 28 October 2016 Boies Schiller Flexner wired Black Cube the first $100,000, toward an invoice of $600,000. The documents do not show how much of that invoice was paid. A contract of 11 July 2017, bearing the signature of David Boies, set the objectives as intelligence that would help the client “completely stop the publication of a new negative article in a leading NY newspaper,” and content of a book “which currently being written and includes harmful negative information on and about the Client.” The client is identified as Weinstein. The work was extended through November 2017. A success fee of a further $300,000 was payable if intelligence contributed to stopping publication entirely. Invoices, with bonuses, could have reached seven figures.

The agency promised officers in the United States and any other necessary country, analysts, linguists, “Avatar Operators” to create fake social-media identities, and specialists in social engineering. It promised a full-time agent named Anna, based in New York and Los Angeles, for four months. Anna was an alias of Stella Penn Pechanac, a former Israeli soldier who spoke about the operation on Israel’s Channel 12 in June 2019; Farrow then named her in The New Yorker. Four sources told the New Yorker that she was the woman who met Rose McGowan and the journalist Ben Wallace (of New York magazine). She obtained 125 pages of McGowan’s manuscript and discussed them with Weinstein.

The agency also agreed to hire an investigative journalist, at the client’s request, for ten interviews a month over four months, at $40,000. Farrow later identified that journalist as Seth Freedman, a former Guardian contributor, who approached Wallace, McGowan and others while taking instructions from a Black Cube project manager. The articles were published. The fee for stopping them was not earned. Avi Yanus is director of the London company B.C. Strategy UK Ltd. Dan Zorella runs the intelligence side. Neither was the agent in the room. The fuller account is on Black Cube and Harvey Weinstein.

See also

• Black Cube
• Black Cube and Harvey Weinstein
• Avi Yanus
• Dan Zorella
• Stella Penn Pechanac
• Seth Freedman
• B.C. Strategy UK Ltd
• Rose McGowan
• Miramax