‘I have mixed reactions about the whole case’

Ashley Judd also told The Times that the outcome was not her ideal form of justice. “I would love for Harvey to have a restorative justice process in which he could come emotionally to terms with his wrongs” through reconciliation, she said, rather than court proceedings leading to incarceration. At the same time, she added, Mr. Weinstein seemed incapable of expressing remorse.

Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in court could come only at the cost of his victims’ pain, according to Chanel Miller, the author of “Know My Name,” a memoir about her experience as the complainant in a high-profile rape case. The process of cross-examination that accusers undergo during a trial can be profoundly taxing; Dawn Dunning, a supporting witness in the trial, called it “definitely the most stressful thing I’ve done in my life.” Ms. Miller said, “Let it not be lost that every victim who walked through the courtroom doors has just added another layer to their trauma.”

[Related: “Coming Forward About Sexual Assault, and What Comes After”]

As a feminist cause, the case took on too much symbolic importance, Aya Gruber, a former defense lawyer and a law professor at the University of Colorado, told The Times. “On the one hand, I am myself a sexual assault survivor and I believe that the #MeToo movement is good. On the other hand, as a former defense attorney, hinging the future of women’s rights on a criminal conviction is a little troubling to me,” she said.

For Ms. Gruber, the case’s outsize significance was made more fraught by the culturally ingrained insistence in the United States on long-term incarceration as the measure of justice. Prison, she said, is a form of “state-imposed suffering and torture,” and it’s a punishment that falls mostly on marginalized people who lack Mr. Weinstein’s resources. “Harvey Weinstein needed to be held accountable,” she said. But “if accountability can only come through decades in horrific conditions in jail, I don’t love that. Not for anyone.”

[Related: “The Weinstein Verdict Is a Complicated Win for Survivors"]

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MORE PERSPECTIVES ON THE VERDICT

“With Weinstein Conviction, Jury Delivers a Verdict on #MeToo” [The New York Times]

“Don’t Tell Me to Be Happy About the Harvey Weinstein Verdict” [The Daily Beast]