Harvey Weinstein Under NYPD Investigation For Alleged Sexual Assault

NEW YORK CITY — The NYPD is investigating one of the many sexual assault accusations against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, a police spokeswoman told Patch. The police department's Special Victims Unit is interviewing an alleged victim of an assault dating back to 2004, the spokeswoman said.

The investigation follows The New Yorker's explosive report on Tuesday in which 13 women accused Weinstein of sexual assault and harassment. Three said the disgraced movie producer raped them.

The police spokeswoman, Officer Arlene Muniz, declined to identify the alleged victim in the case. But the actress Lucia Evans told The New Yorker's Ronan Farrow that Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him at his TriBeCa office in 2004.

Also See: Weinstein's Conduct Is A Question Of Who Knew

The investigation, first reported by the New York Post, follows the NYPD's probe of Weinstein for allegedly groping the Italian model Ambra Battilana in early 2015. Police don't plan to reopen that investigation, an NYPD source told the New York Daily News.

(For more on this and other neighborhood stories, subscribe to Patch to receive daily newsletters and breaking news alerts.)

The 2004 incident involving Evans, then a college student, was the only alleged rape in The New Yorker's story that happened in New York. She told the magazine that Weinstein assaulted her after telling her about two film scripts he was producing.

"The type of control he exerted, it was very real," Evans told Farrow. "Even just his presence was intimidating."

Another actress, Asia Argento, told the magazine that Weinstein gave her oral sex against her will in 1997 at a hotel on the French Riviera. A third unnamed woman said Weinstein raped her, but the story doesn't say where.

The statute of limitations for sex crimes was five years in 2004, but state laws retroactively eliminated that restriction in 2006 and 2008, as long as the clock hadn't run out when those laws were passed, according to the Daily News.

Manhattan prosecutors decided not to charge Weinstein in the 2015 groping incident, despite having a recording in which Weinstein admits to the assault. The New Yorker published the tape Tuesday.

A spokesperson for Weinstein told The New Yorker that he "unequivocally denied" having any nonconsensual sex with any of the women quoted in the story. Weinstein was reportedly fired Sunday from his film production firm, The Weinstein Company. He flew to Arizona to enter rehab on Wednesday, TMZ reported.

(Lead image by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images)