Weinstein Has Mild Heart Attack After Sentencing

Before his sentencing, Weinstein had been housed at an infirmary on the Rikers Island jail complex because of his health problems. Last week, doctors at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan performed a heart procedure, inserting a stent to alleviate a blockage.

Weinstein, 67, appeared in a Manhattan court on Wednesday in a wheelchair and gave a rambling speech, expressing remorse, but never apologizing to his victims. He compared himself to Hollywood figures blacklisted in the 1950s during a national scare over communism.

But Justice James Burke rejected his pleas for leniency, issuing the relatively long sentence. The judge said evidence had been presented at trial of other sexual assaults in the past. While it was Weinstein’s first conviction, he said, it “was not a first offense.”

As his victims broke into tears in the gallery, Weinstein was then handcuffed to his wheelchair and transported back to jail. Within hours, however, he complained of chest pains and corrections officers sent him to a jail ward at Bellevue, his spokesman, Juda Englemayer, said.

In court, Weinstein’s lawyers had made an impassioned plea for the producer to receive a minimum sentence of five years in prison, arguing that even that would likely be a “de facto life sentence.”

“Judge, Mr. Weinstein, is a sick man,” his lawyer, Donna Rotunno, said at the sentencing. “Mr. Weinstein has a multitude of medical issues. There are a list of things that are physically wrong with him and things that are serious.”

Rotunno said in court that Weinstein has a history of heart disease in his family. Without going into detail, she said that one of Weinstein’s diagnosed health problems required close monitoring and could be deadly.

She added that a five-year sentence might mean Weinstein would never return to freedom. “It is very possible that Mr. Weinstein, given his health, doesn’t live to see the end of that sentence,” Rotunno said. “That’s a very sad set of circumstances, but it is a potential fact.”

In December, Weinstein underwent back surgery to repair an injury he received in a car accident four months earlier. Since then, he has used a walker to get around.

His health declined rapidly after a jury of seven men and five women convicted him on Feb. 24 on charges of third-degree rape and first-degree criminal sexual act.

Six women testified against Weinstein at his trial, but the five-count indictment mostly relied on the accusations made by two of them: Miriam Haley, 42, and Jessica Mann, 34.

The jury determined that Weinstein raped Mann in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room in 2013, and that he forcibly performed oral sex on Haley inside his Lower Manhattan loft in 2006.

The jury declined to convict him of the three most serious charges, including the first-degree rape of Mann, concluding that Weinstein did not use force or threaten her. Jurors also did not convict him on two counts of predatory sexual assault.

After the verdict, Weinstein was taken by ambulance from the State Supreme Court in Manhattan to Bellevue Hospital Center with high blood pressure and heart palpitations.

He remained at the hospital for 10 days, underwent the heart procedure to install a stent and was then transferred to the North Infirmary Command, part of Rikers Island that houses inmates whose safety may be at risk if they are placed in the general population.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .

Weinstein Has Mild Heart Attack After Sentencing

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