Harvey Weinstein’s re-emergence as a hero of the far right was probably inevitable.
Before his convictions in New York and California for rape and sexual assault, the movie mogul was a prolific Democratic donor. “He was sort of the king of woke, right?,” Donald Trump said on a 2024 podcast with Dan Bongino, the current deputy director of the F.B.I. “I was so amazed that Harvey Weinstein got schlonged.”
But now the “king of woke” is being embraced by conservatives as a victim of woke overreach. And if Harvey Weinstein, the man whose name became synonymous with #MeToo, can be rehabilitated, well … maybe #MeToo never even happened?
Weinstein is currently being re-tried in New York on similar charges as before, after the original 2020 verdict was overturned by the state’s Court of Appeals. It held that the trial judge wrongly allowed accusers other than the victims named in the charges to testify, in contravention of what is known as the Molineux rule. Such “propensity evidence,” which sought to prove that Weinstein is the kind of person who sexually assaults women, “portrayed [the] defendant in a highly prejudicial light.” The appeals court also worried that permitting prosecutors to cross-examine Weinstein about these uncharged allegations may have influenced his decision to not take the stand in his own defense.
So prosecutors are currently trying Weinstein again, without the character witnesses but with an additional victim, Kaja Sokola, an actress and former model who claims Weinstein assaulted her in a hotel room when she was 16 years old.
Conservative activist Candace Owens is leading the charge to rehabilitate Weinstein and cast the second trial as a referendum on #MeToo. “Movements get really big, and they find someone to hang,” she said on the Keeping It Real podcast. “Weinstein was an easy person to hang because he was immoral.”
Owens, a longtime conservative provocateur, has made a living monetizing bizarre opinions, including that George Soros paid for the protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, the Ku Klux Klan is a “Democrat terrorist organization,” science is “pagan,” and the moon landings were faked. She was fired from the right-wing the Daily Wire for anti-Semitic comments like “Hollywood is run by sinister Jewish gangs.” As such she would seem an odd advocate for Weinstein, a Jewish movie producer. But Weinstein is not ungrateful for the support.
“She may use strong and harsh language and have opinions he can’t agree with or reconcile, and Harvey accepts that,” Weinstein’s P.R. agent, Juda Engelmayer, tells Air Mail. “But her conclusion—that he is not guilty of the crimes he’s been accused of—is something for which he is sincerely grateful.”
Owens’s conclusion—and that of the Weinstein defense team—is that none of the reported assaults count because some victims later sent affectionate notes to Weinstein, the victims had previously consented to sex with him, and they failed to immediately run to the police. It has been enough to convince fellow conspiracy theorist and right-wing podcaster Joe Rogan that the fix was in, too.
“I thought he was guilty of, like, heinous crimes, and then you listen, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what? What is going on?,’” Rogan said on a March 22 broadcast. He also credited Owens with convincing him that French First Lady Brigitte Macron, a mother of three, is secretly trans.
“If this happened in the 80s, it probably would have been thrown out. But in the #MeToo movement, it was a hot witch hunt,” he scoffed. “It’s 2025—that shit’s over,” co-host Brendan Schaub agreed. Weinstein appears to be counting on “that shit” being over.
“The cultural and political atmosphere has shifted, allowing for skepticism and a renewed focus on due process,” Engelmayer says. “That shift offers hope that facts will ultimately prevail over social outcry, and it benefits Harvey as he seeks a fair evaluation of the evidence.”
Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur L. Aidala, a legendarily scrappy litigator and Fox News commentator, described Weinstein’s accusers as having willingly traded sex for career advancement. “The casting couch was not a crime scene,” he told the jurors, adding that “there’s a lot of real estate between immorality and criminality.”
And this argument may well work. Former sex-crimes prosecutor Mitchell Epner notes that “a re-trial ordinarily is an advantage for the defendant, because the government’s witnesses have to testify a second time, and the defense can use discrepancies for effective cross-examination.”
If the prosecution somehow fails to convince the second jury beyond a reasonable doubt that these sexual encounters took place and were non-consensual, then the “victory” will be cast as a repudiation of the entire #MeToo movement. The roughly 100 women who say that Weinstein leveraged his power, both physical and professional, in an attempt to coerce them to have sex with him will be branded as liars.
“It’s a way to shrug off all accusations of rape, sexual harassment, and abuse,” says feminist journalist Amanda Marcotte. “All women lie all the time because that’s how women are, except, of course, Candace Owens, who will tell you the truth.”
Owens’s “truth” is that all the women who accused Weinstein, and, by extension, all the women who spoke out about sexual assault and harassment in the #MeToo movement, are lying. If Weinstein can just beat the rap, then an entire industry did not ignore the routine abuse of women and girls, and America can go back to being the great and good nation that gave us baseball and Mom and apple pie.
It won’t help Weinstein, who was also given a 16-year prison sentence for rape and sexual assault in California, but it will help Owens and Rogan and all the right-wing folk who want that #MeToo “shit” to be over already.
Liz Dye is a Baltimore-based writer. She hosts the Law and Chaos podcast and newsletter and appears regularly on the LegalEagle YouTube channel
