NEW YORK _ An appellate court has rejected Harvey Weinstein's bid to have his criminal trial moved to another part of New York state.
The panel of judges on Thursday denied Weinstein's efforts to have the case moved either to Albany or Suffolk County on the grounds that he's a household name in New York City.
"It is ordered that the motion is denied in its entirety," the one-page decision says.
Weinstein's lawyers previously argued that in order for the movie producer to get a fair trial, he'd need to face a jury away from the media capital of the world.
But prosecutors argued that people everywhere get the same news coverage and that any jury selected in Manhattan Supreme Court would be thoroughly vetted.
The famous defendant "cannot demonstrate that jurors in a smaller, more homogeneous county would not have been exposed to the same newspapers, internet articles, and news programs as their counterparts in New York County," the Manhattan district attorney's office argued in court papers.
Weinstein's high-profile trial was supposed to start after Labor Day but was adjourned to January after prosecutors filed a new indictment against him.
He faces a minimum of 10 years behind bars on the top count _ predatory sexual assault.
He's also charged with forcing a sex act on a production assistant in 2006 and with raping another woman in 2013 at a Doubletree Hotel on Lexington Avenue.
Weinstein maintains his innocence and says that he has never had non-consensual sex with any accuser.
