Weinstein, who has denied all wrongdoing, appealed in 2021, citing a series of issues, including errors at trial.

In their 160-page appeal, Weinstein’s legal team attacked the credibility of the six women who testified at his 2020 trial in lower Manhattan and questioned why some of them stayed in contact with the mogul, and even continued having sex with him, after the alleged crimes. Most of the women’s allegations were corroborated on the stand by others who were told about the assaults around the time they were alleged to have occurred.

In late 2022, a Los Angeles jury also convicted Weinstein of one count of sexual assault in connection with a 2013 attack on a woman inside a Beverly Hills hotel. Weinstein had been charged with sexual assault or misconduct against five women in that case, including Siebel Newsom, but jurors deadlocked or acquitted on the rest of the charges.

He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for that conviction, with the time to be served concurrently with his New York sentence.

Weinstein has also appealed the Los Angeles conviction, again taking aim at the use of testimony from so-called previous bad acts witnesses, who accused him of sexual misconduct that had not been criminally charged in Los Angeles.

LA District Attorney George Gascon told the Los Angeles Times he felt “very comfortable” the California conviction would stand.

“Our case against Mr. Weinstein is very solid,” Gascón said. “We didn’t use the evidence New York did. The California law is strong when comes to this kind of evidence.”

David Ring, an attorney representing Jane Doe 1 in Weinstein’s Los Angeles criminal case, said he was disappointed in Thursday’s ruling but confident Weinstein’s Los Angeles conviction would be upheld.

“As the only victim who has now obtained a criminal conviction against Weinstein, she will continue to stand tall and do whatever necessary to obtain justice not only for herself but for all victims,” Ring said.

One of Weinstein’s defense attorneys in his Los Angeles case, Mark Werksman, celebrated the New York ruling as “a great outcome and the right result.”

“We faced the same fundamental unfairness in the Los Angeles case, where the judge let the jury hear about four uncharged allegations of sexual assault,” Werksman said. “Harvey was subjected to a fire hose of uncharged and incredible allegations, which destroyed his right to a fair trial on the charges in the indictment. The case here should be reversed for the same reasons the New York case was reversed.”

California law, however, allows accusers to testify as witnesses even if their own cases never resulted in charges.

The testimony is admissible because of a change in California evidence law in 1996 that allows witnesses to demonstrate an alleged pattern of behavior or propensity to commit a crime, said Dmitry Gorin, a former L.A. sex-crimes prosecutor. Before the change, California’s law was extremely narrow like New York’s, he said.

Now, prosecutors’ use of previous bad acts testimony in California is so prevalent that police will still investigate sexual assault allegations that cannot be prosecuted because of the statute of limitations because they can still be used as evidence if an allegation that can be prosecuted is ever made.

“Very, very few prior bad acts appeals succeed in California,” Gorin said. “The law on admitting prior sexual assault evidence in California is very broad, and the judge’s decision to let that evidence in can be challenged as an abuse of discretion.”

While New York and California have different rules governing testimony in sexual assault cases, where often victims don’t come forward until long after the statute of limitations has run out, some legal experts say New York’s rules provide a needed layer of protection for defendants.

“You could think of New York as a dinosaur, but I think of it as New York being very vigilant of protecting the civil rights of defendants,” said Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University who is a former criminal appellate attorney in New York.

“It’s a traditional view, maybe it’s a lingering civil libertarian view that the jury punishes someone not for who they are alleged to be, but what they’ve done in this case,” Medwed added. “Loosening the rules of evidence could be a slippery slope to an erosion of all our rights.”

(Times staff writers James Queally and Christi Carras contributed to this report.)

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