Harvey Weinstein’s victims, and those who believe them, finally got their Hollywood ending: the dethroned Hollywood mogul led out of a courtroom in handcuffs.

On Monday, after nearly a week of deliberations, the jury returned its verdict: guilty on two counts, rape and a criminal sex act. Weinstein, who spent his evenings and weekends throughout the trial partying, his days bantering with press and ignoring admonitions by his trial judge, was immediately remanded to jail.

He will likely never get out.

Can you recall a verdict, in recent memory, that felt like such a relief?

It’s hard to overstate how consequential this is — not just because Weinstein’s downfall ignited the #MeToo movement, nor because the outcome felt determinative of the movement’s future.

This case hung on the testimony of two fallible women, each with her own complicated relationship with the now-fallen producer, once so powerful that he boasted of running not just Hollywood but New York City itself.

Would a jury of seven men and five women unanimously believe that Mimi Haleyi or Jessica Mann, two attractive women who dreamed of working in the entertainment industry, who then kept in affectionate contact with their attacker for years, who asked him for favors and accepted his gifts, were actually victims of sexual assault?

For so many watching, it didn’t seem likely. I certainly didn’t think it was likely. But there may have been a clue in the sketch of the jury, looking at photos of a naked Weinstein and recoiling in disgust and horror. The artist was sure to include, in the right corner, one juror casting his head upward and clenching his fist as if to say, “I can’t unsee it!”

Sir, your civic duty is appreciated.

Still, a defense attorney only needs to seed one juror with enough doubt. And this, the defense surely thought, was their slam dunk: On her third day of cross-examination, Mann testified she had sex with Weinstein in 2016, though she claimed he raped her in a Midtown Manhattan hotel in 2013.

This testimony was just three weeks ago and only one day after Mann had such a severe panic attack on the stand that she was removed.

“I do want the jury to know he is my rapist,” she said the next day.

And the jury believed her! They saw the subtext: There is no upside, zero, to offering such complex testimony in such a high-profile, high-stakes trial, to having their faces and names known globally, to recounting in graphic, humiliating detail things that were done to them and things they went on to do that could only redound terribly if Weinstein were acquitted.

And if that had been the outcome, who would have been blamed? Not just the prosecution, but these women who didn’t behave the way victims on TV and in movies do. In stories produced by men like Harvey Weinstein.

This jury, with this verdict — imperfect though it may be, finding Weinstein not guilty on two counts of predatory sexual assault — has shattered the notion that there is a perfect rape victim. A jury with more men than women realized that a victim of sexual assault, especially one who feels her attacker wields continuous, real-world power over her fate, might have reason to remain in contact with him, to continue to have sex or profess love.

Haleyi, then a production assistant, testified that she kept up a relationship with Weinstein after he assaulted her in 2006 because she needed work, and later had sex with him even though she didn’t want to.

“I believe I was trying to regain some sort of power or something,” she said.

Would a jury unanimously believe that? Or believe coerced sex equivalent to rape?

If Haleyi’s testimony seemed flawed, Mann’s seemed to doom the prosecution’s case.

The jury was shown a 2017 email long ago made public by the defense, in which Mann wrote to Weinstein, “I love you, I always do, but I hate feeling like a booty call.” On the stand, Mann admitted asking Weinstein for help obtaining membership in the ultra-exclusive Soho House, with him writing back, “Of course.” She also admitted to seeking advice from Weinstein and asking him, a year after the rape, to meet her mother.

The courtroom exchange was potentially devastating, not least because Weinstein’s lead defense attorney, the one asking these questions, was a woman.

Donna Rotunno: After breakups, the person you decided to reach out to was the person you say sexually assaulted you?

Mann: Yes.

Rotunno: You want the gentleman and ladies of this jury to know that the man you asked to sponsor you [to Soho House] was your rapist?

Mann: I do want the jury to know he is my rapist, and I want to explain the dynamic.

Consider that by this point, Mann appeared defeated. Her voice and demeanor indicated that she knew this was almost impossible to understand, but she had to placate Weinstein to “protect” herself. “From my point of view,” she said, she couldn’t cease contact if she wanted a career.

Again: What was the likelihood a jury would unanimously believe Mann? It’s not as if they could consider the other 80-plus accusers, all with similar stories.

The smartest thing the prosecution did was call Dr. Barbara Ziv, a forensic psychologist who testified to “rape myths” in Bill Cosby’s trial, to do the same here.

Ziv told the jury that more often than not, victims don’t report or disclose right away. Most victims actually know their assailants, and they often don’t resist. When it’s over, they often try to recast the assault as an encounter gone wrong or a one-time exception.

And very often, Ziv said, victims maintain a relationship with their rapist because “they can’t really believe that this happened to them. They’re hoping that this is just an aberration. You hear that all the time.”

And Weinstein, in vacillating between predator and benefactor, played right into that destabilizing dynamic, one in which his targets could never be sure he was truly a bad guy.

If there’s something to be gained from all this collective pain — the courtroom heard Mann’s wails even after she was removed from court during her panic attack — it’s this: We now have a much more dimensional, sympathetic and true understanding of how victims of sexual assault behave. We are now more likely to believe them, even when it would be easier to dismiss such paradoxes.

Black and white thinking, as the jury found, doesn’t apply here. The truth is in the gray areas. And this verdict will, hopefully, have a reach far beyond Weinstein.

In the years since “grab them by the p—y” meant nothing, in a moment now where another presidential candidate shrugs off calling women “fat broads” and “horse-faced lesbians,” the Weinstein verdict is a corrective and an assurance. It reminds us that progress isn’t linear, but is always worth the fight.