NEW YORK (NEWSnet/AP) — New York’s highest court has overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 rape conviction, finding the judge who handled the trial prejudiced the defendant with improper rulings.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the court’s 4-3 decision issued Thursday said. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

As reported earlier, the judge, James Burke, allowed testimony from three women whose allegations weren’t part of the case.

The state Court of Appeals ruling revisits America’s reckoning with sexual misconduct by powerful figures — an era that began in 2017 with allegations against Weinstein and resulted in a wave of public reactions and social media discussions under the #MeToo hashtag.

The court’s majority said “it is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them.”

In the dissent, Judge Madeline Singas wrote that the majority was “whitewashing the facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative,” and said the Court of Appeals was continuing a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”

“The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Singas wrote.

Weinstein, 72, has been serving a 23-year sentence in a New York prison following his conviction on charges of criminal sex act for forcibly performing oral sex on a TV and film production assistant in 2006 and rape in the third degree for an attack on an aspiring actress in 2013.

He will remain imprisoned because he was convicted in Los Angeles in 2022 of another rape and sentenced to 16 years in prison. Weinstein was acquitted in Los Angeles on charges involving one of the women who testified in New York.

In appealing, Weinstein’s lawyers sought a new trial, but only for the criminal sexual act charge. They argued the rape charge could not be retried because it involves alleged conduct outside the statute of limitations.

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