Seven years after allegations against him first emerged online, Harvey Weinstein is back in court.

When the accusations surfaced in late 2017, the American actress Alyssa Milano tweeted: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.”

This gave birth to what we now know as the #MeToo movement and a flood of women – famous and not – sharing stories of gender-based violence and harassment.

Weinstein was jailed in 2020 and has been held at New York’s notorious Rikers Island prison complex ever since.

Today, jury selection begins for the case against the 73-year-old, where the original charges of rape and sexual assault will be heard again.

Here we look at why there’s a retrial – and why he will likely remain behind bars – and what has happened to #MeToo.

Why is there a retrial?

Weinstein is back in court because his first two convictions were overturned last April and are now being retried.

In 2020 he was sentenced to 23 years in prison after being found guilty of sexually assaulting ex-production assistant Mimi Haley in 2006 and raping former actor Jessica Mann in 2013.

But in April 2024, New York’s highest court overturned both convictions due to concerns the judge had made improper rulings, including allowing a woman to testify who was not part of the case.

At a preliminary hearing in January this year, the former Hollywood mogul, who has cancer and heart issues, asked for an earlier date on account of his poor health, however, that was denied.

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When the retrial was decided upon last year, Judge Farber also ruled that a separate charge concerning a third woman should be added to the case.

In September 2024, the unnamed woman filed allegations that Weinstein forced oral sex on her at a hotel in Manhattan in 2006.

Defence lawyers tried to get the charge thrown out, claiming prosecutors were only trying to bolster their case, but Judge Farber decided to incorporate it into the current retrial.

Weinstein denies all the allegations against him and claims any sexual contact was consensual.

Why won’t he be released?

Even if the retrial ends in not guilty verdicts on all three counts, Weinstein will remain behind bars at Rikers Island.

This is because he was sentenced for a second time in February 2023 after being convicted of raping an actor in a Los Angeles hotel room in 2013.

He was also found guilty of forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object in relation to the same woman, named only in court as Jane Doe 1.

The judge ruled that the 16-year sentence should be served after the 23-year one imposed in New York.

Weinstein’s lawyers are appealing this sentence – but for now, the 16 years behind bars still stand.

Has #MeToo made a difference – and what’s changed?

“MeToo was another way of women testifying about sexual violence and harassment,” Dr Jane Meyrick, associate professor in health psychology at the University of West England (UWE), tells Sky News.

“It exposed the frustration around reporting cases and showed the legal system was not built to give women justice – because they just gave up on it and started saying it online instead.

“That was hugely symbolic – because most societies are built around the silencing of sexual violence and harassment.”

After #MeToo went viral in 2017, the statute of limitation on sexual assault cases was extended in several US states, giving victims more time to come forward, and there has been some reform of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), which were regularly used by Weinstein.

This has resulted in more women speaking out and an increased awareness of gender-based violence, particularly among women, who are less inclined to tolerate any form of harassment, according to Professor Alison Phipps, a sociologist specialising in gender at Newcastle University.

“There’s been an increase in capacity to handle reports in some organisations and institutions – and we’ve seen a lot of high-profile men brought down,” she says.

“But the #MeToo movement has focused on individual men and individual cases – rather than the culture that allows the behaviour to continue.

“It’s been about naming and shaming and ‘getting rid’ of these bad men – by firing them from their jobs or creating new crimes to be able to send more of them to prison – not dealing with the problem at its root.”

Dr Meyrick, who wrote the book #MeToo For Women And Men: Understanding Power Through Sexual Harassment, gives the example of the workplace and the stereotype of “bumping the perp”, or perpetrator.

“HR departments are still not designed to protect workers – they’re built to suppress and make things go away.” As a result, she says, men are often “quietly moved on” with “no real accountability”.

The same is true in schools, Prof Phipps adds, where she believes concerns around the popularity among young boys of self-proclaimed misogynist and influencer Andrew Tate are being dealt with too “punitively”.

“The message is ‘we don’t talk about Andrew Tate here’ and ‘you shouldn’t be engaging with him’,” she says. “But what we should be doing is asking boys and young men: ‘why do you like him?’, ‘what’s going on here?’ – that deeper conversation is missing,” she says.

Have high-profile celebrity cases helped?

Both experts agree they will have inevitably empowered some women to come forward.

But they stress they are often “nothing like” most other cases of sexual violence or harassment, which makes drawing comparisons “dangerous”.

Referencing the Weinstein case in the US and Gisele Pelicot‘s in France, Dr Meyrick says: “They took multiple people over a very long period of time to reach any conviction – a lot of people’s experiences are nothing like that.”

Prof Phipps adds: “They can create an idea that it’s only ‘real’ rape if it’s committed by a serial sex offender – and not every person who perpetrates sexual harm is a serial offender.”

Part of her research has focused on ‘lad culture’ in the UK and associated sexual violence at universities.

She says: “A lot of that kind of violence happens in social spaces, where there are drugs and alcohol and young people thrown together who don’t know where the boundaries are.

“That doesn’t absolve them of any responsibility – but comparing those ‘lads’ to Harvey Weinstein seems inappropriate.”

Dr Meyrick says most victims she has spoken to through her research “wouldn’t go down the legal route” – and prosecution and conviction rates are still extremely low.

“Most don’t try for justice. They just want to be believed and heard – that’s what’s important and restorative,” she says.

But specialist services that can support victims in that way are underfunded – and not enough is being done to change attitudes through sex education and employment policy, she warns.

“Until we liberate men from the masculine roles they’re offered by society – where objectification of women is normalised as banter – they will remain healthy sons of the patriarchy.

“We need transformative, compassionate education for young men – and young women. That’s where the gap still is.”

The White Lotus star Aimee Lou Wood has called a sketch making fun of her teeth “mean and unfunny”.

The 31-year-old British actress posted an Instagram story about the joke on US TV show Saturday Night Live (SNL), in which comedian Sarah Sherman used exaggerated prosthetic teeth to do an impression of her.

In the skit, titled The White Potus, Donald Trump and his family were reimagined as The White Lotus’s Ratliff family, dealing with the backlash to the US president’s recently introduced tariffs.

The third season of Mike White’s hit hotel drama has just concluded on Sky Atlantic.

While the other characters in the skit were shown in the guise of real-life political figures, Wood, who plays Chelsea in the show, was show in character talking about a monkey.

Wood, who shot to fame on Netflix’s Sex Education, said she was the only character in the piece that was “punched down on”.

She also said a part of the parody that joked about fluoride, following recent debates in the US as to if it should be removed from the tap water, was missing the point as she has “big gap teeth not bad teeth”.

Wood wrote: “Yes, take the piss for sure – that’s what the show is about – but there must be a cleverer, more nuanced, less cheap way?”

The Stockport-born star also flagged Sherman’s poor attempt at a Mancunian accent.

But Wood went on to say that she wasn’t “hating” on Sherman personally, just “on the concept”.

Wood also flagged an online comment that said: “It was a sharp and funny skit until it suddenly took a screeching turn into 1970s misogyny,” adding, “This sums up my view”.

After sharing her opinions, Wood said she had received “thousands of messages in agreement” and so was “glad I said something”.

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Wood shared comments of support she had received.

One, from an unnamed fan, said she too had “a big gap” in her teeth, as well as “an overbite” and that while she had been previously considering “spending thousands on fixing it,” seeing Wood look “gorgeous” on The White Lotus had made her reconsider.

Wood said SNL has since apologised to her.

Wood previously said, during an appearance on The Jonathan Ross Show, that the positive reception to her performance was “a real full-circle moment after being bullied for my teeth forever”.

NBC, which airs SNL, has been contacted for comment.

Erin Brockovich says a chance conversation about a muddy stiletto with her chiropractor led to the making of the award-winning film about her life.

The climate activist, who was played by Julia Roberts in the movie, told Sky News: “My girlfriend, who was a chiropractor, was giving me a chiropractic adjustment and asked me why I had mud on my stilettos.

“I said, ‘Oh, I’ve been collecting dead frogs’. She goes, ‘What is wrong with you?’ So, I started telling her what I was doing.”

Then just a junior paralegal, Brockovich was in fact pulling together evidence that would see her emerge victorious from one of the largest cases of water contamination in US history in Hinkley, California.

Her hard work would see her win a record settlement from Pacific Gas & Electric Company – $333m (£254m) – but that was all still to come.

Little did Brockovich know, but her tale of a muddy stiletto would get back to actor Danny DeVito and his Jersey Films producing partner Michael Schamburg, and through them to the film’s director Steven Soderbergh.

Brockovich says Soderbergh was “wowed” by what he heard.

She says he realised her image “was something that Hollywood might be drawn to that I was never thinking of – the short skirt, the attitude, the big bust, the stilettos, the backcombed hair. Somehow, it came together.”

‘I was always going to be misunderstood’

Released in 2000, the powerful story of one woman’s fight for justice made Brockovich a household name, and the film won actress Julia Roberts an Oscar.

Now, 25 years on, Brockovich says she believes her legal victory was helped in part by an unlikely ally – her learning difficulty.

Brockovich says: “Had I not been dyslexic, I might have missed Hinkley.”

Recently named a global ambassador for charity Made By Dyslexia, she’s been aware of her learning differences since childhood and still struggles today.

She says “moments of low self-esteem” still “creep back in”, and she long ago accepted “I was always going to be misunderstood”.

But for Brockovich, recognising her dyslexic strengths while working in Hinkley proved a pivotal moment: “My observations are wickedly keen. I feel like a human radar some days… Things you might not see as a pattern, I recognise. There are things that intuitively, I absolutely know.

“It will take me some time in my visual patterns of what I’m seeing, how to organise that. And it was in Hinkley that that moment happened for me because it was so omnipresent [and] in my face. Everything that should have been normal was not.”

‘A huge perfect storm’

Brockovich paints a bleak picture of what she saw in the small town: “The trees were secreting poison, the cows were covered in tumours, the chickens had wry neck [a neurological condition that causes the head to tilt abnormally], the people were sick and unbeknown to them, I knew they were all having the exact same health patterns. To the green water, to the two-headed frog, all of that was just I was like on fire, like electricity going, ‘Oh my gosh, what’s going on out here?'”

She describes it as “a huge, perfect storm that came together for me in Hinkley”.

But a side effect of the movie – overnight global fame – wasn’t always easy to deal with.

Brockovich calls it “scary,” admitting, “when the film first came out the night of the premiere, I was literally shaking so bad, I was so overwhelmed, that Universal Studios said, ‘If we can’t get you to calm down, I think we need to take you home’. It was a lot”.

Brockovich says she kept grounded by staying focused on her work, her family and her three children.

With Hollywood not always renowned for its faithful adherence to fact, Brockovich says the film didn’t whitewash the facts.

“I think they really did a good job at pointing out our environmental issues. Hollywood can do that, they can tell a good story. And I’m glad it was not about fluff and glamour. I’m glad it was about a subject that oftentimes we don’t want to talk about. Water pollution, environmental damage. People being poisoned.”

‘Defend ourselves against environmental assaults’

While environmental awareness is now part of the daily conversation in a way it wasn’t a quarter of a century ago, the battle to protect the climate is far from over.

Just last month, Donald Trump laid out plans to slash over 30 climate and environmental regulations as part of an ongoing effort to boost US industries from coal to manufacturing and ramp up oil and minerals production.

In response, Brockovich says, “We’re not going to stop it, but we can defend against these environmental assaults.

“We can do better with infrastructure. We can do better on a lot of policy-making. I think there’s a moment here. We have to do that because the old coming into the new isn’t working.

“I’ve recognised the patterns for 30-plus years, we just keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over again, expecting a different result.

“For me, sometimes it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, just get your ego out of the way’. We have to accept that this might be something greater than us, but we can certainly defend ourselves and protect ourselves and prepare ourselves better so we can get through that storm.”

You can listen to Brockovich speaking about her dyslexia with Made By Dyslexia founder Kate Griggs on the first episode of the new season of the podcast Lessons In Dyslexic Thinking, wherever you get your podcasts.