NEW YORK _ Hollywood producer turned sexual predator Harvey Weinstein was convicted of rape and sexual assault by a Manhattan jury Monday as his long-awaited day of #MeToo reckoning finally arrived.
But a jury found him not guilty of the top charge predatory sexual assault, meaning the Oscar winner dodged a possible life sentence.
Weinstein had a look of resignation on his face as he was convicted of forcibly performing oral sex on a woman in 2006 and of third-degree rape in 2013.
The once-powerful Hollywood mogul stared straight ahead as the verdicts were read in Supreme Court in Manhattan.
As the jury was taken back behind closed doors, Weinstein continued to sit at the defense table, with several court officers standing close by. He then began talking to his lawyers.
The disgraced producer faces anywhere from five to 25 years behind bars on the top charge of forced oral sex, and up to four years for third-degree rape. Judge James Burke ordered Weinstein to be remanded until his sentencing on March 11.
Weinstein's team of five high-powered attorneys immediately vowed to appeal.
"The fight is not over," Weinstein's defense lawyer Donna Rotunno said. "It is absolutely horrible for me to watch my client be taken into custody ... Harvey's unbelievably strong, he took it like a man. He knows we'll continue to fight for him."
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance praised lead prosecutor Joan Illuzzi and the women who testified against Weinstein.
"These are the eight women who changed the course of history in the fight against sexual violence," he said. "This is the new landscape for survivors of sexual assault in America. This is a new day."
Attorney Gloria Allred, who represents two of the women who testified, said the jury reached the right decision.
"I just heard (Weinstein's) attorney said that he was shocked, that he was surprised by the verdict. Well, he shouldn't have been surprised," she said.
"If you do to women what (he did), you shouldn't be surprised ... you shouldn't be shocked, you should've been prepared for this. It's no longer business as usual in America. This is the age of empowerment of women and you cannot intimidate them anymore," Allred said.
The jury's verdict, in the fifth day of intense deliberations, came barely a month past the Jan. 22 opening arguments in the Manhattan courthouse.
The decision followed a tumultuous week where the jury of seven men and five women asked Burke if they could deliver a divided verdict in the extraordinarily high-profile prosecution of the exceptionally well-known defendant. The panel indicated in a Friday note that they were hung up on the top counts of predatory sexual assault.
The 67-year-old defendant, who opted not to testify in his own defense, heard the verdict along with his hard-charging defense team inside the jam-packed courtroom.
The Oscar-winning producer of "Shakespeare in Love" was accused in the last three years by approximately 90 women with sexual misconduct ranging in tenor from insensitive to indictable across the decades. Weinstein, who still faces criminal charges in California, has maintained that all the sexual encounters were consensual.
His trial marked the highest-profile #MeToo prosecution since comedian Bill Cosby's April 2018 sexual assault conviction.
Manhattan jurors convicted Weinstein of raping aspiring actress Jessica Mann in 2013 and sexually assaulting his former production assistant Miriam Haley in 2006, with both women taking the stand to testify against him.
Four other accusers, including Emmy-nominated actress Annabella Sciorra of "The Sopranos," testified in excruciating detail about their unwanted sexual encounters with Weinstein as prosecutors presented the jury with evidence of an alleged pattern of horrific behavior.
Actress Rosie Perez recounted how a terrified Sciorra, after telling her that she was raped by the filmmaker, explained why she didn't go to the police: The powerful Weinstein, a friend of President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary, would "destroy me."
Weinstein's defense team called just seven witnesses inside the 15th-floor courtroom, while prosecutors summoned 28 people to testify _ with their case anchored by the emotional accounts delivered through tears and sobs by the half-dozen accusers.
The witnesses wept as they conjured up gut-wrenching memories for the jury, with Sciorra describing in detail the winter's night in 1993-94 when the hulking Weinstein burst into her Manhattan apartment and allegedly raped the 110-pound actress.
"He kept coming at me," said Sciorra, the first Weinstein accuser to testify against him at a criminal trial. "I felt overpowered because he was very big. ... I was just trying to get away from him and he put my hands over my head to hold me back, and he got on top of me and he raped me."
Mann, who spent three days on the witness stand, told jurors how the disgraced Hollywood mogul raped her inside his room at The DoubleTree Hotel in Manhattan's Midtown East on March 18, 2013.
Mann said that after trapping her inside his room, Weinstein instructed her "like a drill sergeant" to get undressed before forcefully raping her. After the assault, she discovered a just-used needle inside a bathroom trash can _ left there by Weinstein, who injected himself with an unknown drug to get an erection.
Mann, a Washington state native and one-time evangelical Christian, also accused the "Pulp Fiction" producer of raping her a second time at The Pensinsula Hotel in Beverly Hills in November 2013.
Mann was aggressively cross-examined during her three days on the stand, describing her volatile relationship with the once larger-than-life producer. She described a complex relationship that included sexual encounters that were nonconsensual, consensual and often forced or coerced.
Haley, a Swedish citizen who worked briefly off-the-books as a production assistant on the set of "Project Runway," testified that Weinstein lured her to his SoHo loft in summer 2006. He proceeded to pin her to a bed and perform forcible oral sex.
"I started realizing what was actually happening: 'I'm being raped,'" Haley testified. "He held me down on the bed and he forced himself on me orally. I was on my period. I had a tampon in there, I was mortified."
Defense attorneys used friendly emails Haley had sent to Weinstein after the alleged rape to discredit her testimony, and noted that she flew to Los Angeles on his dime just a few days later.
The trial began more than two years after allegations of sexual misconduct were first published about Weinstein in The New York Times and The New Yorker in October 2017.
Weinstein still faces felony charges in California for forcible rape, forcible oral copulation, sexual penetration by use of force and sexual battery by restraint stemming from a pair of 2013 incidents.
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