Harvey Weinstein’s record of sexual attacks and harassment against women dates back to the 1970s in a “lifetime of abuse” in which he “trapped women into his exclusive control and assaulted or attempted to assault them”, according to New York prosecutors.

In a note to the New York supreme court released on Friday ahead of Weinstein’s sentencing next week, the lead prosecutor at his rape trial essentially threw the book at the fallen movie mogul. Without providing the state’s desired sentence, Joan Illuzzi-Orbon urged Judge James Burke to impose “a sentence that reflects the seriousness of [his] offenses, his total lack of remorse for the harm he has caused, and the need to deter him and others from engaging in further criminal conduct”.

Illuzzi-Orbon gives a devastating account of Weinstein’s sexual crimes. She says of Weinstein that “throughout his entire adult professional life, [he] has displayed a staggering lack of empathy, treating others with disdain and inhumanity. He has consistently advanced his own sordid desires and fixations over the well-being of others.”

She then itemises a stunningly long list of Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct, drawing on a two-year investigation out of the New York district attorney’s office. She breaks the shocking litany up into three categories: “sexual assault and harassment”, “bad acts and behavior in the work environment” and “other bad acts”.

In total, the sentencing memo chronicles 36 instances of alleged sexual abuse, bullying, harassment and threats over a span of 40 years.

Last month the jury of seven men and five women found the former movie mogul guilty of sexually assaulting former production assistant Miriam Haley and of raping an aspiring actor who the Guardian has not named as her wishes in terms of identification are not known.

Haley testified that Weinstein forced oral sex on her in his home in 2006, while the other key witness testified that he raped her in March 2013, early in an “extremely degrading” relationship she had with him.

The jury acquitted Weinstein on the most serious charges, which carried a potential life sentence.

Extraordinarily, the prosecutor’s litany of Weinstein’s sexual and other bad behavior begins as far back as 1978, when it alleges a woman working in Weinstein’s then music company in Buffalo, New York, met him in New York City for a business meeting. There he told her there was only “one room left” at his hotel; later that night she woke up in their shared room “to find him lying on top of her and forcing himself sexually on her”.

Weinstein's enablers: how associates helped him silence accusers for years Read more

The next entry is dated to the summer of 1981, when a woman turns up for an audition. She is met by Weinstein in a hotel room wearing only a terrycloth robe. “Everyone calls me Teddy Bear because I’m so big and cuddly and harmless,” he is alleged to have said.

Weinstein then told the woman that he would give her any movie part she wanted if she had sex with him, the sentencing memo says. “Defendant said that when a man is obese, normal sexual positions would not work and other options would have to be used to ‘get him off’.”

In the UK in the 1990s, Weinstein is alleged to have lured a 19-year-old employee to his hotel room under the guise of a script meeting. “Defendant then sexually assaulted the employee, who was left in extreme shock and had difficulty comprehending what had happened.”

In another incident in the UK in 1991, a woman also aged 19 who worked as an intern for Weinstein for just one day was told by her supervisor to visit him in his hotel suite. There she was forced to see him naked in the bathtub and to watch him lying on his bed with his dressing gown open. He forced her to take her own top off before she fled.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Actor Rose McGowan speaks at a news conference with actor Rosanna Arquette outside a Manhattan courthouse where Weinstein’s trial was held. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP

Under the category of “abusive behavior in the workplace”, the memo lists numerous examples of Weinstein’s alleged tantrums and tirades. They include the movie mogul throwing a table of food at an employee who disagreed with him, threatening staff physically and professionally, and getting executives to lie on his behalf.

One business executive described Weinstein to prosecutors as “despicable, aggressive, demeaning, coercive, threatening” and as someone who would “make you do things you don’t want to do”.

Another witness described Weinstein attacking his brother Bob Weinstein so badly that “he bled a great deal and was briefly unconscious”. A former board member of Weinstein’s movie production company said he threatened to “send someone to his office to cut off his genitals with gardening shears”.

The final entry in the litany of horrors relates to the woman who Weinstein raped in 2013 for which he faces a possible maximum prison sentence of four years. Illuzzi-Orbon alleges that the woman was one of “multiple people” who reported to prosecutors that Weinstein had bragged to them about his ability to get people killed.

Weinstein told his rape victim that “he could send men with baseball bats to assault her father if she wanted, bragging that he had done that with other people in the past”, the memo claims.

A lawyer for Weinstein had no immediate comment about the allegations made in the sentencing note.

In its memo, the New York district attorney’s office is seeking to firm up the groundbreaking nature of Weinstein’s conviction. The once-powerful titan of Hollywood, who produced such cult films as Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love, was found guilty of one charge of a criminal sex act and one of rape in the third degree which combined carry a maximum sentence of 29 years in prison.

The guilty verdict broke a glass ceiling in prosecutions of sexual assault in the US by convicting a defendant who continued to be in intimate contact with his victims, in some cases sexually. Such cases have almost never been taken all the way to trial as prosecutors have assumed that juries would acquit.

Marking the historic victory, Illuzzi-Orbon states in her memo: “It is totally appropriate in this case to communicate to a wider audience that sexual assault, even if perpetrated upon an acquaintance or in a professional setting, is a serious offense worthy of a lengthy prison sentence.”

Weinstein was moved to the prison on Rikers Island in New York on Thursday having undergone heart surgery. He will be sentenced on Wednesday.

He still faces sexual assault charges in Los Angeles, which were announced just hours after his New York trial began in January. Dozens of women have also filed civil lawsuits against him.