A California appeals court has upheld disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s 2022 rape and sexual assault conviction but ordered the trial court to resentence him.

The appeals court on Friday affirmed Weinstein's conviction for sexually assaulting an Italian model in her hotel room during a film festival in Los Angeles. The woman’s identity was withheld during the trial.

Weinstein was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being found guilty in the case.

“We are disappointed by today’s decision and respectfully disagree with the Court of Appeal’s conclusions regarding the fairness of Mr. Weinstein’s trial,” Juda Engelmayer, a Weinstein spokesperson, said in an email, according to AP. “At the same time, the court correctly recognised that his sentence cannot stand”.

Weinstein's lawyers, Jennifer Bonjean and Michael Freedman, had sought to overturn the conviction, arguing in a 2024 appeal that the trial had been “doomed from the start”.

The defence argued that jurors had been informed during jury selection about Weinstein’s earlier rape conviction in New York, which they said had “infected” the proceedings.

The lawyers also contended that prosecutors had focused on Weinstein's character rather than the charges against him, citing evidence relating to his alleged mistreatment of women.

More than 80 women have accused Weinstein of sexual assault or misconduct over the years. He has denied the allegations.

His legal team further alleged that the complainant gave false testimony regarding the nature of her relationship with Pascal Vicedomini, head of a film festival, claiming the evidence was crucial to establishing Weinstein's innocence.

According to the defence, questioning on the issue would have shown that the woman committed perjury when she described Vicedomini as only a friend and colleague, and would have supported the argument that she was not in her hotel room on the night of the alleged assault.

The ruling comes a day after New York prosecutors dropped a separate rape charge against Weinstein.

In 2020, Weinstein was convicted in New York of raping actress Jessica Mann in a hotel. However, the conviction was overturned in 2024 after an appellate court ruled that the trial had been prejudiced by testimony from women whose allegations were not part of the case.

Prosecutors retried Weinstein in 2025, but the case ended in a mistrial after the jury became deadlocked. A third trial in May this year also resulted in a mistrial.

The New York rape charge was dropped this week after Mann declined to testify in a fourth trial.

Weinstein is, however, awaiting sentencing in September on a separate assault conviction in New York involving another woman. Prosecutors are seeking a 20-year prison sentence. He would begin serving his California sentence only after completing proceedings in New York.