The blow came while he was waiting to use the telephone. Harvey Weinstein asked the man ahead of him if he had finished; the man stepped down and struck him hard in the face. The former producer fell to the floor, bleeding heavily. When prison officers asked who had hit him, he kept silent. “You can’t be a snitch,” he later told The Hollywood Reporter from Rikers Island. “It’s the law of the jungle.” That interview, published in March, offered a rare, visceral glimpse of life inside the New York jail complex that Weinstein has called “hell” — a place where, he said, he spends up to 23 hours a day in his cell, speaking only to guards and nurses.

Two weeks ago, that precarious existence took a sharp medical turn. Weinstein began struggling to breathe, and prison staff transferred him from Rikers Island to the prison ward of Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan. According to the American entertainment outlet TMZ, which cited anonymous sources with direct knowledge, he suffered heart failure linked to a bout of pneumonia. He remains in the ward, connected to an intravenous line and a heart monitor, receiving a course of antibiotics. His publicist confirmed to the Los Angeles Times that Weinstein is “recuperating and resting” at Bellevue, while a representative told the trade publication Deadline that he will stay in hospital “at least for the next few weeks.” Doctors have noted some improvement, but he is not yet out of danger.

Weinstein’s health has been fragile for years. In 2024 alone he was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukaemia, underwent emergency heart surgery, and was treated for COVID-19 and double pneumonia. His legal situation is equally tangled. A 2020 New York conviction for a felony sex crime and third-degree rape, which brought a 23-year sentence, was overturned on appeal in 2024. A subsequent retrial last summer convicted him on one count of sexual assault from 2006, and he now awaits a September sentencing in that case, with prosecutors seeking a 20-year term. Separately, he is serving a 16-year sentence in California for raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel in 2013; a state appeals court recently upheld that conviction but ordered a resentencing. A third New York trial, concerning allegations by hairstylist Jessica Mann, ended in a mistrial earlier this year. Viewed from newsrooms in Buenos Aires, Moscow, Rome and Sydney, the cascade of health emergencies and courtroom reversals has kept Weinstein’s name in headlines long after the initial #MeToo reckoning. In Argentina, where the movement took the form of #MiráCómoNosPonemos, the coverage has underscored the distance between his former power and his present isolation.

What lingers is the image of a man who once commanded red-carpet seasons now lying in a guarded hospital bed, his heart rhythm traced by a monitor, his lungs fighting infection. In that March interview, Weinstein spoke of a “terrible fear” of dying inside Rikers. “Whatever they think I did bad in my life, I didn’t get the death penalty,” he said. “I don’t want to die in here.” For now, he is not in Rikers but in a prison ward, the same institutional fluorescence, the same legal limbo, the same uncertain pulse.