use biography in a sentence

Examples of 'biography' in a sentence

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All ENGLISH words that begin with 'B'

Use "biography" in a sentence

Biography example sentences.

1. It contains the biography collection of different

2. 'I've been asked by a representative of the Danvers House Foundation to research Miss Danvers' papers and try to put together a biography

3. Joe like I told you elsewhere in my biography , is a pretty good mechanic and pretty good parts man and he quickly figured out that the timing chain was gone on the car and it needed to be replaced

4. Would you like to reflect with me on what follows, thinking about how your biography might be projected on the big screen? Would it be billed as a drama, or a comedy, or maybe even a horror story? Or perhaps a bit of all of the previous, rolled into one super full-length movie that will surely have sequels to be made in the years ahead?

5. Whatever the case, how about reflecting with me on what follows, thinking about how your biography might be projected on the big screen? Ready or not, here we go…

6. Maybe I have a only few hours left in this body or many more years until I gasp my last breath and my biography then comes to a final conclusion

7. Read any objective biography of Stalin, and at least one unbiased history of the Soviet Union in the thirties

8. (I wish I could recall the title of the biography I found it in

9. A biography to finish with

10. However, according to his biography , he

11. Some information from his biography which I share with you below

12. He did left a cryptic message in his biography the day he left

13. His biography appeared in that year’s edition of “Noteworthy Americans of the Bicentennial Era” and also in “International Register of Profiles - World Edition, 1976”

14. Roger had al ready been cited in “Outstanding Educators of America” (1971), “Dictionary of International Biography ” (1973) and “Men of Achievement” (1974)

15. The list includes "Outstanding Educators of America" 1971, "Dictionary of International Biography " 1973, "Men of Achievement" 1974, "Noteworthy Americans of the Bicentennial Era" and "Who’s Who in the West" 1975, International Register of Profiles World Edition 1976, and "Who’s Who among Hispanic Americans" 1992-93

16. Love, Trip After my father died, one of his television stations put together a videotape biography on him, which did a good job of tracking his life

17. When you were playing Time of the Ages you could just focus your attention on any character and it would bring up complete biography and stats

18. Whenever she faced insurmountable difficulties in her more than thirty years of mission to protect the environment in India, she would turn to his biography for strength and renew her determination to pursue her objectives

19. In his biography , it is stated that "Bradman was most taken by Tendulkar's technique, compactness and shot production, and had asked his wife to have a look at Tendulkar, having felt that Tendulkar played like him

20. Your biography , as it relates to your expertise

21. It was an afternoon to forget – which I did until twenty-two years later when a lecturer in English literature approached me in the staffroom bearing a recent biography of his hero, Anthony Burgess

22. I finally found what I was searching for, a biography of the Commodore

23. Nakamura’s security file was an interesting read if you enjoyed a biography of one of America’s best and brightest citizens---a Horatio Alger story if there ever was one

24. How could he have given her the true Dracos biography ? The old dear would have gone apoplexic

25. The biography worked its way to her status as a social policy critic and friend to seniors always working hard to improve the lives of seniors and help out their families

26. His biography is in the Dictionary of Literary Biography , and his

27. in the running the Stallman story as a biography

28. ning that O'Reilly intended to publish the biography both as a

29. this is a biography of Richard Stallman, it seemed inappropri-

30. thought of writing a historical biography

31. Allan Nevins wrote a friendly biography of the robber baron from Cleveland, which I haven’t read

32. But even a Potter book or a presidential biography with high sales may not be in the class of one that is struggling to get exposed to the public

33. The book, appropriately enough, is called, The Beatles: The Illustrated And Updated Edition Of The Best-selling Authorized Biography

34. ‘’We are checking on that right now, sir, but she officially is an only child and her parents died in a car accident when she was sixteen, according to her official biography

35. It’s the critical biography of the man who rose to become Speaker of the House – I wouldn’t want him in mine

36. For a delightful and informative read, I recommend Appetite for Life: The Biography of

37. To understand how bad things were, read the biography of a great woman, Mother

38. First, I am what my official biography and military file says 419

39. Speedbumps: Flooring it through Hollywood is the biography of the actress, Teri Garr

40. History, an entertaining, sometimes hysterical biography of the maturing of a journalist, growing up in New Jersey

41. I saw a Ken Burns biography of the development of broadcast radio and (infant) TV last night and how two American engineers, Lee DeForrest and Edwin Howard Armstrong spent 20 years and millions in attorneys fees and court costs (1930s-1950s) to contest patents in court

42. Kevin’s book, My Life as a Furry Red Monster: What Being Elmo Has Taught Me about Life, Love and Laughing out Loud, is the biography of a teacher, who was dedicated to follow his dream without a college degree, which he has achieved

43. whose biography is a litany of irresponsibility and grievance about his

44. Your biography is dictated by

45. Ignoring the fact that the authorities in Poland rarely deprived any writer of the freedom of expression, Tsosnik’s magisterial biography of Pilsudski had just emerged after years of internment by the censor

46. Once out of the conference room, Ingrid went to her office, where Senior Airman Denise Bateman was waiting for her, finding her reading with great interest the book on Nancy Laplante that Ingrid had written years ago along with her own biography as a female fighter pilot during World War Two

47. questioned by the masses In Letters from the Earth Mark Twain asserted that the Bible, in describing God, is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere, and that God is a malign thug

48. Could it be that he was no superhero? Or perhaps these moments of indecision were left out of the average superhero biography

49. group: there wil be enough book editors and biography producers interested in their life

50. I remember reading Abbie Hoffman’s biography a long time ago

51. Indeed, it is precisely this apparent lack of a biography that qualifies these leaders to represent and bring about a fantastic and grandiose future

52. It was faith in Christ's "words of eternal life" which made that honourable woman, Catherine Tait, as recorded in a most touching biography , resign five children in five weeks to the grave, in the full assurance that Christ would keep His word, take care of them both in body and soul, and bring them with Him to meet her at the last day

53. According to her biography she met acknowledged genius the famous Albert Einstein

54. material for that biography

55. about me having met Quick or Teef, or about the biography

56. Loyd and Alicia had finished writing their sections of Quick’s biography , but Dale, Jeremy and I still

57. An attempt is made here towards this end that owes the content, and at times the text even, wherever quoted, of “Muhammad – his life based on the earliest sources”, the remarkable biography by Martin Lings published by Inner Traditions International, USA

58. The following episode in Martin Ling’s biography of Muhammad would be illustrative

59. In madrasas that the clergy preside over are attended by the majority of the Muslim children, the topics of study include an introduction to the Muslim faith and practice, worship forms, biography of the Prophet Muhammad, and stories of other heroes of the faith

60. But for now, the Musalmans are ever on the look out for the ways and means to assert their Islamic separateness, which, for the muse of a poet would seem: Oh goddamn faith, how thou divide ‘the God’ from gods and ‘the Musalmans’ from other humans! Why if only the moulanas approach Muhammad’s life, not in awe but with insight, for a solution to their vexatious separatist inhibitions, pointers are aplenty in Martin Ling’s biography of his

61. Can an animal be a “helpful scholar and a consultan?” can an animal have a laboratory to do research and fill the literature with different discoveries? Can an animal prepare his own biography ? Can an animal be NASA swimming in space?

62. this advice which I came across while reading the biography that

63. Then, there are those with genuine prejudices too, and these had much to do with the denunciations of Islam that were carried out in Europe during the Crusades, which passed on from generation to generation, and Karen Armstrong has written on the same in her very balanced biography of Prophet Muhammad, in which she has also critiqued the prophet on some points, and as a reviewer has put it, she has been “respectful but not reverential”

64. That is exactly as we mentioned in the biography of the Meccan

65. is the biography of Muhammad and the Hadith is what Muhammad

66. A Beautiful Mind is a movie based on the dramatic and moving biography by Sylvia Nasar about John Forbes Nash, Jr

67. Your biography , as it relates to your expertise for this book

68. 210,gives a short biography , though the study is in the main apenetrating investigation of

69. We are rankly vegetarian again, Papa leading the way with immense determination, for he has set his heart at this unfortunate juncture on a new biography of Goethe that must needs come out just now, a big thing in two volumes costing a terrible number of marks, very well done, full of the result of original digging among archives; but he dare not buy it, he says, in the present state of our affairs

70. It was the official biography of Michael Wong, showing his personal antecedents and his professional qualifications and experience

71. The details were again scant but they did answer the question as to why his most prominent medical position was not included in the previous biography

72. She too was worried she might he dragged into a mess even though all she had done was provide him with Michael Wong’s biography

73. Then what I found amusing in the biography of

74. They contain logical arguments, poetry, songs and hymns, history, biography , stories, parables, fables, eloquence, law, letters and philosophy

75. In Heredia's biography two factsshould be stressed: that

76. From Verdi’s biography derives that his first bad season ended in 1825, while a

77. Picasso’s biography shows that a bad season started for him in 1892, which was

78. biography I had already studied

79. For this purpose, I took the biography of Napoléon I, who was almost an exact contemporary of Beethoven

80. From Napoléon’s biography derives that his good and bad seasons alternated at

81. * I have based all Hugo’s biography in this chapter on Cesare Giardini’s Hugo,

82. From Hugo’s biography derives that his seasons alternated every 16-17 years in

83. * My main source for Churchill’s biography of this chapter is Sebastian Haffner’s

84. produced a colossal work, the four-volume biography of his ancestor, Marlborough

85. From Columbus biography is revealed, therefore, that the lives of the persons

86. see in his detailed biography in another chapter– that the good and bad seasons in

87. I’s biography reveals –as her biography cited later shows– that her life’s seasons

88. Thus, Onassis’s biography reveals that the

89. As we’ll see, for example, in Christopher Columbus’s biography later, he

90. biography , though the majority of the British cabinet’s members was against

91. at the age of 50, as we’ll see in his biography , but later he became world’s

92. biography later), and many others had seen their works being rejected during their

93. As we’ll see later in Queen Elizabeth I of England’s biography , when she was three, she legally became a bastard, she was deprived of her title of

94. Gorbachev’s biography shows that his seasonal alternations occurred at the dates

95. But his biography also shows how Gorbachev’s life was radically influenced

96. biography , you’ll also see how the alternations of his good and bad seasons we’ve

97. From Mandela’s biography is confirmed that his seasonal alternations occurred at

Synonyms for "biography"

"biography" definitions.

an account of the series of events making up a person's life

How To Use Biography In A Sentence

• Stark gave Izzard the warmest of welcomes and seems to have put no obstacle in the way of a biography . 0 0
• a biography ...appreciative and yet judicial in purpose 0 0
• Moceanu has written an autobiography , had book signings and cashed in on corporate and commercial appearances. 0 0
• A short autobiography is prefixed to the 1827 edition of Juvenal. 0 0
• In closing, I would like to reflect upon what I think was the most disturbing, and unnoticed, subtheme of Van Sant's film biography of Harvey Milk. Archive 2009-01-01 0 0

• The tone of Nicholls' biography is dispassionately respectful, admiring even. 0 0
• I had just published my autobiography , which met with universal disapproval. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• What drove him remains a mystery in a book that is more hagiography than biography . Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• There are further parallels to be drawn within this illusory cat 's cradle of fiction, memoir and biography . Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Therefore, saccharorrhea patient wants the reality treatment this question certainly not to want to readily believe some not symbol actual suitable biography . 0 0
• I asked the guy who would bowdlerize Larry Niven if given the chance this question: "If someone was writing the biography of your life, would you want it to have a sex scene? Bowdlerized 0 0
• On the downside, this dependency on biography and history means that sometimes the tales do not stand in their own right. 0 0
• In this rather archaically written biography , marred by ornate, stilted language and the author's reliance on and citation of endlessly extended passages from his great-great-grandfather's autobiography , James Mellon struggles mightily but fails to make his readers care much for or about Thomas Mellon. Banking On the Future 0 0
• A ghosted autobiography requires a deep bond between sportsman and journalist. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Each character is given a home instance, personalized to their biography choices, located in their racial capital - Hoelbrak for the norn, the Grove for the sylvari, and so forth. 0 0
• In his biography Alec Guinness: The Unknown, Garry O'Connor reveals that Guinness was arrested and fined 10 guineas for a homosexual act in a public lavatory in Liverpool in 1946. 0 0
• How grateful and enlightened he must be to have that cleared up: one wouldn't want a thicko to write one's autobiography . 0 0
• Well, you can wait for the autobiography or you can come with me to shop for formalwear. 0 0
• Maraniss's balanced biography is not a "pathography," obsessive about its subject's defects. Rough Rider In Green Bay 0 0
• They're rerunning a two-part ‘ Biography for Kids’ that Harry did, visiting the set and interviewing the folks behind, in and under the Muppets. 0 0
• Why nobody has ever written a biography of David is beyond me. 0 0
• There is biography , hagiography and social, religious and political history. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• This is the first official biography of her and it is introduced by her daughter. 0 0
• This turns biography into hagiography: the subject isn't a mere artist working through his aesthetic ideas, he's Christ among the doubters and Pharisees. 0 0
• One final irony: In 1950, at age 82, Millikan published his Autobiography , with Chapter 9 entitled simply "The Experimental Proof of the Existence of the Photon--Einstein's Photoelectric Equation. 0 0
• A profile is a collection of information about the user, typically including a short biography and contextually appropriate facts. 0 0
• A good biography is weakened by not giving the major biographical facts due prominence. 0 0
• Keynes would have interpreted this as an extreme outbreak of liquidity-preference, says Paul Davidson, whose biography of the master has just been republished with a new afterword. 0 0
• His biography is eminently sensible on a subject about which much high-flown transcendental nonsense has been written. 0 0
• Her mother, Jackiey, the daughter of a market trader, was described in her daughter's autobiography as a petty thief and "clipper" - a woman who pretends to be a prostitute but runs off with the money instead. DUFF & NONSENSE! 0 0
• As he accepts, it would have been dishonest to write an autobiography without touching on this subject. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• The biography is an attempt to uncover the inner man. 0 0
• The biography is a useful corrective to the myths that have grown up around this man. 0 0
• I have some time to spare and would like to sit down and read my copy of the biography of Berlioz. 0 0
• What I discovered in Bruce Hindmarsh's learned biography was that Newton became a convert not because of his disgust for the slave trade, but because of his horror at the dissolute life he had led. 0 0
• Snow was an accomplished author as well, having published a biography of Anthony Trollope as well as several novels, including a whodunit. 0 0
• This new biography will revive interest in an eccentric and rare polymath of the last century. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• His history is, he argued, "a biography of things, a filiation of objects, not as pictures of an exhibition, but as records of the process of their coming into existence. Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early 20th Century Vienna 0 0
• Derek Jarman's Caravaggio presents itself as a loose, poeticized biography of the famed Baroque painter Michelangelo de Caravaggio, but in fact Jarman appears to be using his subject as a gateway into ruminations on art, love, violence and religion. Caravaggio 0 0
• Publication of his biography was timed to coincide with his 70th birthday celebrations. 0 0
• They had met originally when Verrall was writing a biography of Cromwell for which William had done much of the research. 0 0
• The biggest surprise in this colourful biography is that its subject allowed it to be published. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• After all, in her 1993 autobiography she disclosed one or two juicier titbits contained in the files, which she was allowed to see soon after the Wall came down. 0 0
• Her achievements are chronicled in a new biography out this week. 0 0
• It takes a bold writer to attempt a biography of one of the most recognized and cited of Restoration Englishmen. 0 0
• ANDREW MORTON, AUTHOR, "TOM CRUISE: AN UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY ": He could be in the position of what they call inspector general inside scientology. CNN Transcript Jan 17, 2008 0 0
• Unless you want to write a very long biography indeed, a measure of rapid movement is in most cases unavoidable. The Times Literary Supplement 0 0
• … reminds me of an image Deirdre Bair sketches in her biography of the game young Samuel used to play diving fearlessly from the tops of tall trees, crashing through branches to the ground. 2009 May 05 | NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS 0 0
• Between these two positions lies a range of literacy activity, such as personal autobiography , diaries, functional lists etc. 0 0
• Indeed there is probably more fiction in autobiography than there is autobiography in fiction. 0 0
• I don't want a biography of your old French wine - bibber. Flush of Gold 0 0
• Some companies have used "biodata" a mash-up of the words biography and data. How to Ace a Google Interview 0 0
• This is another very interesting part of the biography that is missing from the first print run. 0 0
• He also wrote several short biographies on early identities to be included in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography . 0 0
• While at the BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas next week, I’ll be signing copies of my autobiography I’ll Do It Myself in which I intimately share living with cerebral palsy to show others that cp is not a death sentence, but rather a life sentence: Do It Myself Blog – Glenda Watson Hyatt » 2007 » November 0 0
• It is not everyday that you find an autobiography so disarmingly direct and candid. 0 0
• The thing about this biography is that it is not fair, it is unbalanced and it is biased, and it is what John Howard would call a ‘black armband biography ’. 0 0
• He saved his carfares and went without lunch until he had enough money to buy an encyclopedia of American biography - and then he did an unheard-of thing. 0 0
• Along the way he offers a sort of autobiography of his bibliomania, which takes him across New England and the rest of the country searching for old books. 0 0
• This highly condensed biography allows little room for analysis. 0 0
• The Guardian's Book Review has a review of his new biography of the grumpiest man in popular music, which advises you to snap it up quick before Van's solicitors run their toothcombs over it. 0 0
• There are elements of autobiography in these acute, erudite, elegant and amusing essays. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Matilda of Canossa had obsessed Maureen for the better part of the last two years, possessing her first when Maureen read the autobiography of the controversial countess, and then as she wrote her latest book in honor of this remarkable woman. The Poet Prince 0 0
• The story she unfolds is both biography and intellectual parable. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Film biography , a special film of genre with a long historic tradition, profound aesthetic particularity and stong vitality during the whole development of cinematics. 0 0
• A brief preface goes before the first part which provides a brief biography of Hugo Wolf including the forming and development of his peculiar style. 0 0
• This biography sometimes crosses the borderline between fact and fiction. 0 0
• ‘ Biography ’ scriptwriters churn out copy that is always simple, straightforward, and unrelievedly vanilla. 0 0
• Prepare a two-line biography detailing your skills with a contact number. 0 0
• Jack . Welch Autobiography & gt ; praised as " the Holy Bible of CEO ". 0 0
• He said he would, but there were three more volumes of his biography and accompanying document collections to complete first. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• The letters were used as source material in this new biography . 0 0
• The third was a lengthy and dully-written biography of a late nineteenth-century general. 0 0
• And he found time to write two volumes of autobiography in which he could give full vent to his views on theatre. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Adams' biography confesses to concentrating less on the later years and this deprives the book of a conclusive judgment about its subject. 0 0
• Sarah Bradford is right to spend two-thirds of her quiet, lucid biography on the years before the assassination. 0 0
• While going through such varied sources, it is a great joy when one finds an autobiography or a biography or an unpublished piece of writing. 0 0
• She wrote in her autobiography that The Manchurian Candidate was ‘a dynamite film,’ though she had worried about working with Frank Sinatra. 0 0
• Ironically, it is only possible to write a cultural biography of this horse, insofar as it is possible, because of his multiply commodified status. 0 0
• Mandelstam's attitude to the interrelation of biography and poetic persona was complex. The Times Literary Supplement 0 0
• The sleeve notes include a short biography of the performers on this recording. 0 0
• The major events of Woodman's biography have clearly marked her artistic growth. 0 0
• The trailer actually undersells the film, while the storyboards and biography make for intriguing viewing. 0 0
• It does Mr. Chernow no disservice to regard his biography as a culmination of a long biographical tradition that has divested Washington of his marmoreal armor. The Life of the Lives 0 0
• Larkin had his diaries destroyed, Hardy burnt all his personal papers, then got his second wife to put her name to the biography he had actually written himself. 0 0
• Maybe we could even rush out a quickie biography , explaining to the masses the meaning of Mr. Greenspan's life and work. 0 0
• The Wonder edition includes an informative biography and a discography of his recordings. 0 0
• Autobiography used to be the preserve of hammy actors, gammy lieutenant commanders and superannuated hangers-on to the Bloomsbury Group. 0 0
• It is a famously unclassifiable book, part cultural criticism, part autobiography , mixing participant ethnography with literary analysis. The Times Literary Supplement 0 0
• In her autobiography she said curiosity had made her take the job, but 60 years on she admits she failed to let herself see the atrociousness of the regime she worked for. 0 0
• Life, as every biography and obit I have ever read confirms, is what happens when you are making other plans. 0 0
• I think it's like the whole history of Italian art in the biography of one person. A TALE OF FOUR HOUSES: Opera at Covent Garden, La Scala, Vienna and the Met since 1945 0 0
• Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning continues this tense push-pull struggle with biography throughout its pages. 0 0
• I thought, 'Doing this autobiography is more serious than I thought. With No Ax to Grind 0 0
• Through bursts of laughter he told me that the first extracts of the new biography about Jack have finally been landing on editors' desks. 0 0
• Despite honourable exceptions, the ubiquitous dramatised biography has probably been the most accident-prone arts genre. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Beyond the headlines inspired by his recent autobiography , it is easy to recognise just how the modern game has transformed his life. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• These texts, written in the style of 1980s bonkbuster novels but with the content of newsy autobiography , could change the face of publishing. Bonk-bios, the perfect beach books 0 0
• The fifth was a biography of a famous writer, which Boy read twice with great fascination. 0 0
• The result of her research is a new biography , Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson, which includes much unpublished material. 0 0
• Earlier over lunch I had been three pages into a biography of the man who invented Freon when the article suddenly made no sense at all - instead of freon, it was now discussing Medieval paint technology. 0 0
• As well as being erudite, witty and utterly shameless, his autobiography shows he was capable of great mercy. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• These and other insights into a distinguished writer 's life are reason enough to read this chronological autobiography . Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• But in light of his political biography there can be no doubt of his preparedness to assume a ministerial office in a Union-led government. 0 0
• He is engaged on a biography of his father. 0 0
• About 70,000 copies of the biography were published but it was soon suppressed by the German government. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Critics regularly mutter about how hard it is to write literary biography in the 21st century. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• She wrote the first Kerouac biography in 1973. 0 0
• Record in my Notes to this Manuscript, but except as subsidiary and elucidative of the Text, I put no value on such: express Biography of me, I had really rather that there/[Page xviii]/should be none. New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle 0 0
• Sandrart's story of Caravaggio's death is easily interpreted as an apologue rather than as biography because there is so little ground to confuse moral and factual truths. 0 0
• It is a great new form of literature: biography of a few months in one country. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• I’m enjoying reading Carl Sandburg’s biography on Abraham Lincoln — it’s great writing, it’s informative, and I feel good after reading a chapter or two. 0 0
• This biography makes it abundantly clear. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• George is the survivor, the cat with nine lives, and he has an autobiography for every one of them. 0 0
• The script used is Potter's own condensed and Americanised version of the BBC's, written, according to Humphrey Carpenter's fine biography , in 1990. 0 0
• He re-read his father's autobiography and realised they shared many character traits. 0 0
• This autobiography will appeal most to those interested in the history of the Chattahoochee Valley. 0 0
• It contains a potted biography , stressing the adulation and the good works. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• This new biography contains a wealth of previously unpublished material. 0 0
• But I managed to correct and amplify an account of his biography and works sufficiently to provide a decent introduction to that edition. The Times Literary Supplement 0 0
• In four volumes of autobiography and three books of journals he distilled much of the flavour of each decade of a remarkable century. 0 0
• Both deeper and wider than a biography , the book documents and vivifies events that still affect us today. 0 0
• A first-rate biography might have reminded the art world of his unique eloquence. 0 0
• In The Name is not a Pilger biography but an account of Pilger's television work with which the journalist himself co-operated. 0 0
• Certainly this critique of autobiography has validity; how many autobiographers are truly honest even with themselves, let alone with their readers, about themselves in narrative? 0 0
• It's not a biography (although a brief bio of Powell is included). 0 0
• V. Johnston, '' Pitirim A. Sorokin an Intelellectual Biography '' (1995) * [[Pitirim Sorokin]] (1889-1968), Russian-American macrosociology; '' Social and Cultural Dynamics '' (4 vol., Conservapedia - Recent changes [en] 0 0
• Over the centuries, Laozi's life took on elements of the mythological hero's biography . 0 0
• So it is with biography and particularly royal biography , a genre that does not suffer from publishing neglect. The Times Literary Supplement 0 0
• He is currently trying to give up smoking as a full-time displacement activity while working on a literary biography . Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• Yet men dominate in this field also, even in fiction, poetry, literary biography . 0 0
• This is in essence a short and rather conventional biography which breaks no new ground but is a good summary of current knowledge. 0 0
• His life is chronicled in a new biography published last week. 0 0
• With an affectionate and admiring smile on his own face, he has written an unaffected biography of an unaffected great man. 0 0
• Marje now admits that her carefully nurtured image has been torn apart by revelations from a new biography . 0 0
• His official NASA biography listed a diverse number of hobbies -- oil painting, woodworking, motorcycling, and racquetball, to name a few. Jim Noles: Twenty-Five Years Ago, We Lost More Than a Space Shuttle 0 0
• After Lacroix, Man Ray spent about six years with the famed Parisian demi-mondaine Kiki de Montparnasse, to whom he devoted an entire chapter in his autobiography . 0 0
• In simplest terms, he is a computer security celebrity junketeer, a highly specialized occupation somewhat obscured by an official biography bulging with professional-strength acronyms. 0 0
• As he wrote in his autobiography : 'I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. Times, Sunday Times 0 0
• The biography explains the circumstances surrounding her fall from grace. 0 0
• Review: Biography : Polo reminted: A study that strips away the myths to let us see the great Venetian traveller afresh delights Kevin Rushby: Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu by Laurence Bergreen 448pp, Quercus, pounds 19.99 Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu, by Laurence Bergreen 0 0
• Still, autobiography may be the land of the invented past but, when the person is interesting enough and the life is large enough, the compensations are considerable. 0 0
• The eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has sometimes been labeled a hagiographer for the Camelot chords he struck, but A Thousand Days is an intricate and serious narrative biography with sweeping historical themes and incisive drypoint character sketches. American Sketches 0 0
• Mr. Scheuer is out to present something perhaps slightly different from a biography — more a guide to understanding Osama bin Laden, with biographic features included, because he sees bin Laden as America's central adversary. America's Most Wanted 0 0
• Her book is not only a biography , but the detailed chronicle of a social milieu. The Times Literary Supplement 0 0
• There is a story told in his otherwise unrevealing autobiography which nicely illuminates the practical side of this pursuit of goodness. 0 0
• This new biography is the first to consider fully the writer's gestalt. 0 0
• Biography fleshes out the daily realities of living as aliens in your own land and provides insight into indigenous history over the entire 20th century. 0 0
• Known as a master of tokiwazu bushi, a Japanese song featured in Kabuki plays, she published her autobiography two years ago. Autopsy Disclosed 0 0
• He said he'd been working hard recently on his autobiography , which was now half finished. 0 0
• This accessible mini- biography rejects these simplicities and presents a much more rounded account. 0 0
• Even European history of the period was an official or semi-official biography of the state. 0 0
• He was an occasional obituarist for The Independent and The Guardian and a contributor to the New Dictionary of National Biography . 0 0
• In his autobiography , he explains in detail why it did not become a worldwide business. 0 0
• The library also has a wide range of titles on gardening, cookery, history, computers, biography and travel. 0 0
• In his Autobiography he reports a personal experience of racial harassment. 0 0
• Whilst it could be argued that it is po-faced to talk about truth in the biography of a fictional character, the counter-argument is that the constant toying with fiction and fact is ultimately frustrating. 0 0
• In ways that this biography seems not entirely to appreciate, Kennan's far-sighted opposition to American over-militarisation makes his personal career history less gripping than his legacy. 0 0
• In his autobiography , King mentioned that when he "chivved" someone (interesting that the slang hasn't changed), he was always careful to draw the blade downwards across the face, never upwards or sideways, so as not to slash a major artery. A Night With Annie Nightingale; Mary Anne's Send Off Show; Bandits of the Blitz; Jamie Cullum 0 0
• He was reading the Russell autobiography in order to steady himself for the selection procedure. 0 0
• Burderop farmer Charles W Whatley recalls his schooldays at Swindon High School in his autobiography Farming And Foxhunting published c1940, where Mr Snell had the reputation of pushing on the smart and forward boys. Undefined 0 0
• I was intrigued to read in your autobiography that your relationship with your parents was starchy and formal, while you were close to your grandmother. 0 0
• Also archaeologists, the Gears apply over thirty years of research with their backgrounds in biblical archaeology, religious studies, Greek, and Latin, to reveal a new and relatively unknown and historically unsupported biography of Jesus Christ, or Yeshua. “The Betrayal: The Lost Life of Jesus” by Kathleen O’Neal Gear and W. Michael Gear (Forge, 2008) « The BookBanter Blog 0 0
• Tebow's autobiography , audaciously written when he was merely a 23-year-old second-string quarterback most critics called a miscast running back, came out in June. USATODAY.com News 0 0
• In her autobiography , she describes the song's genesis late one night in a Dublin bar. 0 0
• It makes one wonder how much of the speech is true and how much is false, based on Stalin's tendency toward revisionism of his revolutionary biography . 0 0
• Hence, the new image was done on the basis of Don Bosco's little biography of the boy Saint as well as eyewitness accounts gathered for the process of Canonisation . 0 0
• Greenblatt instead wants to write, and most consumers of literary biography want to read, a story extraordinary and uplifting. 0 0
• The first two installments of a projected seven-volume biography of one of the portlier Founding Fathers. Cover to Cover 0 0
• According to his biography , he wrote and recorded parts of this album while living in the studio for two months. 0 0
• Rowlandson intersperses her autobiography with numerous quotations from the Bible. 0 0
• It's been promoted as the biography that lays bare the truth behind the legend. 0 0
• But Wyler is barely more visible in his biography than in his films. 0 0
• For now Ricky is busy attending book signings around the country to promote his autobiography Ricky. 0 0
• In some ways, this biography should be applauded for its total absence of the prurient interest so common to most of its peers. 0 0
• As it cools, write another autobiography . The Sun 0 0
• Drummund, who was also a biographer for Billy Graham, wrote an excellent biography on Finney which deals with this. 0 0
• Her book is a mesh of biography and a wider history of the geisha. 0 0
• One might have thought such an unlikely colossus of Australian political history would have encouraged a few level-headed intellectuals and journalists to write a serious biography . 0 0
• His autobiography is set to become a massive hit - but it seems not even the England captain can topple Harry Potter from top spot. 0 0
• In deeply unpropitious times, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has refreshed and fortified our sense of what can still be meant by the collective endeavour of ‘scholarship’. 0 0
• ANDREW MORTON, AUTHOR, "DIANA: HER TRUE STORY": Well, I was writing a biography of Diana, and we had a mutual friend called James Coldhurst (ph). CNN Transcript Mar 10, 2004 0 0
• Further, Langdon deems the sculpture — which depicts St. Teresa of Avila in spiritual ecstasy, based on a description in her autobiography — as pornographic, as it supposedly depicts the saint “on her back in the throes of a toe-curling orgasm.” Ron Howard, Angry & Demeaning? 0 0
• While trying to help starving villagers, Yunus met a 21-year-old woman named Sufia Begum, who was burdened by a tiny yet crushing debt, Yunus recalled in his autobiography , "Banker to the Poor. 0 0
• I, Dreyfus takes the form of its eponymous hero's autobiography , penned while in prison. 0 0
• The thesis is divided into five parts as follows:"Introduction"presents a brief biography of Lyman Frank Baum and a brief introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. 0 0
• IT was supposed to be his grand comeback - a new album and autobiography out on consecutive days after months of hard work. The Sun 0 0

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How to Write a Biography

Biographies are big business. Whether in book form or Hollywood biopics, the lives of the famous and sometimes not-so-famous fascinate us.

While it’s true that most biographies are about people who are in the public eye, sometimes the subject is less well-known. Primarily, though, famous or not, the person who is written about has led an incredible life.

In this article, we will explain biography writing in detail for teachers and students so they can create their own.

While your students will most likely have a basic understanding of a biography, it’s worth taking a little time before they put pen to paper to tease out a crystal-clear definition of one.

What Is a Biography?

A biography is an account of someone’s life written by someone else . While there is a genre known as a fictional biography, for the most part, biographies are, by definition, nonfiction.

Generally speaking, biographies provide an account of the subject’s life from the earliest days of childhood to the present day or, if the subject is deceased, their death.

The job of a biography is more than just to outline the bare facts of a person’s life.

Rather than just listing the basic details of their upbringing, hobbies, education, work, relationships, and death, a well-written biography should also paint a picture of the subject’s personality and experience of life.

Full Biographies

Teaching unit.

Teach your students everything they need to know about writing an AUTOBIOGRAPHY and a BIOGRAPHY.

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Features of a Biography

Before students begin writing a biography, they’ll need to have a firm grasp of the main features of a Biography. An excellent way to determine how well they understand these essential elements is to ask them to compile a checklist like the one-blow

Their checklists should contain the items below at a minimum. Be sure to help them fill in any gaps before moving on to the writing process.

The purpose of a biography is to provide an account of someone’s life.

Biography structure.

ORIENTATION (BEGINNING) Open your biography with a strong hook to grab the reader’s attention

SEQUENCING: In most cases, biographies are written in chronological order unless you are a very competent writer consciously trying to break from this trend.

COVER: childhood, upbringing, education, influences, accomplishments, relationships, etc. – everything that helps the reader to understand the person.

CONCLUSION: Wrap your biography up with some details about what the subject is doing now if they are still alive. If they have passed away, make mention of what impact they have made and what their legacy is or will be.

BIOGRAPHY FEATURES

LANGUAGE Use descriptive and figurative language that will paint images inside your audience’s minds as they read. Use time connectives to link events.

PERSPECTIVE Biographies are written from the third person’s perspective.

DETAILS: Give specific details about people, places, events, times, dates, etc. Reflect on how events shaped the subject. You might want to include some relevant photographs with captions. A timeline may also be of use depending upon your subject and what you are trying to convey to your audience.

TENSE Written in the past tense (though ending may shift to the present/future tense)

THE PROCESS OF WRITING A BIOGRAPHY

Like any form of writing, you will find it simple if you have a plan and follow it through. These steps will ensure you cover the essential bases of writing a biography essay.

Firstly, select a subject that inspires you. Someone whose life story resonates with you and whose contribution to society intrigues you. The next step is to conduct thorough research. Engage in extensive reading, explore various sources, watch documentaries, and glean all available information to provide a comprehensive account of the person’s life.

Creating an outline is essential to organize your thoughts and information. The outline should include the person’s early life, education, career, achievements, and any other significant events or contributions. It serves as a map for the writing process, ensuring that all vital information is included.

Your biography should have an engaging introduction that captivates the reader’s attention and provides background information on the person you’re writing about. It should include a thesis statement summarising the biography’s main points.

Writing a biography in chronological order is crucial . You should begin with the person’s early life and move through their career and achievements. This approach clarifies how the person’s life unfolded and how they accomplished their goals.

A biography should be written in a narrative style , capturing the essence of the person’s life through vivid descriptions, anecdotes, and quotes. Avoid dry, factual writing and focus on creating a compelling narrative that engages the reader.

Adding personal insights and opinions can enhance the biography’s overall impact, providing a unique perspective on the person’s achievements, legacy, and impact on society.

Editing and proofreading are vital elements of the writing process. Thoroughly reviewing your biography ensures that the writing is clear, concise, and error-free. You can even request feedback from someone else to ensure that it is engaging and well-written.

Finally, including a bibliography at the end of your biography is essential. It gives credit to the sources that were used during research, such as books, articles, interviews, and websites.

Tips for Writing a Brilliant Biography

Biography writing tip #1: choose your subject wisely.

There are several points for students to reflect on when deciding on a subject for their biography. Let’s take a look at the most essential points to consider when deciding on the subject for a biography:

Interest: To produce a biography will require sustained writing from the student. That’s why students must choose their subject well. After all, a biography is an account of someone’s entire life to date. Students must ensure they choose a subject that will sustain their interest throughout the research, writing, and editing processes.

Merit: Closely related to the previous point, students must consider whether the subject merits the reader’s interest. Aside from pure labors of love, writing should be undertaken with the reader in mind. While producing a biography demands sustained writing from the author, it also demands sustained reading from the reader.

Therefore, students should ask themselves if their chosen subject has had a life worthy of the reader’s interest and the time they’d need to invest in reading their biography.

Information: Is there enough information available on the subject to fuel the writing of an entire biography? While it might be a tempting idea to write about a great-great-grandfather’s experience in the war. There would be enough interest there to sustain the author’s and the reader’s interest, but do you have enough access to information about their early childhood to do the subject justice in the form of a biography?

Biography Writing Tip #2: R esearch ! Research! Research!

While the chances are good that the student already knows quite a bit about the subject they’ve chosen. Chances are 100% that they’ll still need to undertake considerable research to write their biography.

As with many types of writing , research is an essential part of the planning process that shouldn’t be overlooked. If students wish to give as complete an account of their subject’s life as possible, they’ll need to put in the time at the research stage.

An effective way to approach the research process is to:

1. Compile a chronological timeline of the central facts, dates, and events of the subject’s life

2. Compile detailed descriptions of the following personal traits:

•      Physical looks
•      Character traits
•      Values and beliefs

3. Compile some research questions based on different topics to provide a focus for the research:

• Childhood : Where and when were they born? Who were their parents? Who were the other family members? What education did they receive?
• Obstacles: What challenges did they have to overcome? How did these challenges shape them as individuals?
• Legacy: What impact did this person have on the world and/or the people around them?
• Dialogue & Quotes: Dialogue and quotations by and about the subject are a great way to bring color and life to a biography. Students should keep an eagle eye out for the gems that hide amid their sources.

As the student gets deeper into their research, new questions will arise that can further fuel the research process and help to shape the direction the biography will ultimately go in.

Likewise, during the research, themes will often begin to suggest themselves. Exploring these themes is essential to bring depth to biography, but we’ll discuss this later in this article.

Research Skills:

Researching for biography writing is an excellent way for students to hone their research skills in general. Developing good research skills is essential for future academic success. Students will have opportunities to learn how to:

• Gather relevant information
• Evaluate different information sources
• Select suitable information
• Organize information into a text.

Students will have access to print and online information sources, and, in some cases, they may also have access to people who knew or know the subject (e.g. biography of a family member).

These days, much of the research will likely take place online. It’s crucial, therefore, to provide your students with guidance on how to use the internet safely and evaluate online sources for reliability. This is the era of ‘ fake news ’ and misinformation after all!

COMPLETE TEACHING UNIT ON INTERNET RESEARCH SKILLS USING GOOGLE SEARCH

Teach your students ESSENTIAL SKILLS OF THE INFORMATION ERA to become expert DIGITAL RESEARCHERS.

⭐How to correctly ask questions to search engines on all devices.

⭐ How to filter and refine your results to find exactly what you want every time.

⭐ Essential Research and critical thinking skills for students.

⭐ Plagiarism, Citing and acknowledging other people’s work.

⭐ How to query, synthesize and record your findings logically.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING Tip #3: Find Your Themes In Biography Writing

Though predominantly a nonfiction genre, the story still plays a significant role in good biography writing. The skills of characterization and plot structuring are transferable here. And, just like in fiction, exploring themes in a biographical work helps connect the personal to the universal. Of course, these shouldn’t be forced; this will make the work seem contrived, and the reader may lose faith in the truthfulness of the account. A biographer needs to gain and maintain the trust of the reader.

Fortunately, themes shouldn’t need to be forced. A life well-lived is full of meaning, and the themes the student writer is looking for will emerge effortlessly from the actions and events of the subject’s life. It’s just a case of learning how to spot them.

One way to identify the themes in a life is to look for recurring events or situations in a person’s life. These should be apparent from the research completed previously. The students should seek to identify these patterns that emerge in the subject’s life. For example, perhaps they’ve had to overcome various obstacles throughout different periods of their life. In that case, the theme of overcoming adversity is present and has been identified.

Usually, a biography has several themes running throughout, so be sure your students work to identify more than one theme in their subject’s life.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING Tip: #4 Put Something of Yourself into the Writing

While the defining feature of a biography is that it gives an account of a person’s life, students must understand that this is not all a biography does. Relating the facts and details of a subject’s life is not enough. The student biographer should not be afraid to share their thoughts and feelings with the reader throughout their account of their subject’s life.

The student can weave some of their personality into the fabric of the text by providing commentary and opinion as they relate the events of the person’s life and the wider social context at the time. Unlike the detached and objective approach we’d expect to find in a history textbook, in a biography, student-writers should communicate their enthusiasm for their subject in their writing.

This makes for a more intimate experience for the reader, as they get a sense of getting to know the author and the subject they are writing about.

Biography Examples For Students

• Year 5 Example
• Year 7 Example
• Year 9 Example

“The Rock ‘n’ Roll King: Elvis Presley”

Elvis Aaron Presley, born on January 8, 1935, was an amazing singer and actor known as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Even though he’s been dead for nearly 50 years, I can’t help but be fascinated by his incredible life!

Elvis grew up in Tupelo, Mississippi, in a tiny house with his parents and twin brother. His family didn’t have much money, but they shared a love for music. Little did they know Elvis would become a music legend!

When he was only 11 years old, Elvis got his first guitar. He taught himself to play and loved singing gospel songs. As he got older, he started combining different music styles like country, blues, and gospel to create a whole new sound – that’s Rock ‘n’ Roll!

In 1954, at the age of 19, Elvis recorded his first song, “That’s All Right.” People couldn’t believe how unique and exciting his music was. His famous hip-swinging dance moves also made him a sensation!

Elvis didn’t just rock the music scene; he also starred in movies like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock.” But fame came with challenges. Despite facing ups and downs, Elvis kept spreading happiness through his music.

Tragically, Elvis passed away in 1977, but his music and charisma live on. Even today, people worldwide still enjoy his songs like “Hound Dog” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love.” Elvis Presley’s legacy as the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll will live forever.

Long Live the King: I wish I’d seen him.

Elvis Presley, the Rock ‘n’ Roll legend born on January 8, 1935, is a captivating figure that even a modern-day teen like me can’t help but admire. As I delve into his life, I wish I could have experienced the magic of his live performances.

Growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis faced challenges but found solace in music. At 11, he got his first guitar, a symbol of his journey into the world of sound. His fusion of gospel, country, and blues into Rock ‘n’ Roll became a cultural phenomenon.

The thought of being in the audience during his early performances, especially when he recorded “That’s All Right” at 19, sends shivers down my spine. Imagining the crowd’s uproar and feeling the revolutionary energy of that moment is a dream I wish I could have lived.

Elvis wasn’t just a musical prodigy; he was a dynamic performer. His dance moves, the embodiment of rebellion, and his roles in films like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock” made him a true icon.

After watching him on YouTube, I can’t help but feel a little sad that I’ll never witness the King’s live performances. The idea of swaying to “Hound Dog” or being enchanted by “Can’t Help Falling in Love” in person is a missed opportunity. Elvis may have left us in 1977, but he was the king of rock n’ roll. Long live the King!

Elvis Presley: A Teen’s Take on the Rock ‘n’ Roll Icon”

Elvis Presley, born January 8, 1935, was a revolutionary force in the music world, earning his title as the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” Exploring his life, even as a 16-year-old today, I’m captivated by the impact he made.

Hailing from Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis grew up in humble beginnings, surrounded by the love of his parents and twin brother. It’s inspiring to think that, despite financial challenges, this young man would redefine the music scene.

At 11, Elvis got his first guitar, sparking a self-taught journey into music. His early gospel influences evolved into a unique fusion of country, blues, and gospel, creating the electrifying genre of Rock ‘n’ Roll. In 1954, at only 19, he recorded “That’s All Right,” marking the birth of a musical legend.

Elvis wasn’t just a musical innovator; he was a cultural phenomenon. His rebellious dance moves and magnetic stage presence challenged the norms. He transitioned seamlessly into acting, starring in iconic films like “Love Me Tender” and “Jailhouse Rock.”

However, fame came at a cost, and Elvis faced personal struggles. Despite the challenges, his music continued to resonate. Even now, classics like “Hound Dog” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” transcend generations.

Elvis Presley’s impact on music and culture is undeniable. He was known for his unique voice, charismatic persona, and electrifying performances. He sold over one billion records worldwide, making him one of the best-selling solo artists in history. He received numerous awards throughout his career, including three Grammy Awards and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Elvis’s influence can still be seen in today’s music. Many contemporary artists, such as Bruno Mars, Lady Gaga, and Justin Timberlake, have cited Elvis as an inspiration. His music continues to be featured in movies, TV shows, and commercials.

Elvis left us in 1977, but his legacy lives on. I appreciate his breaking barriers and fearlessly embracing his artistic vision. Elvis Presley’s impact on music and culture is timeless, a testament to the enduring power of his artistry. His music has inspired generations and will continue to do so for many years to come.

Teaching Resources

Use our resources and tools to improve your student’s writing skills through proven teaching strategies.

BIOGRAPHY WRITING TEACHING IDEAS AND LESSONS

We have compiled a sequence of biography-related lessons or teaching ideas that you can follow as you please. They are straightforward enough for most students to follow without further instruction.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 1:

This session aims to give students a broader understanding of what makes a good biography.

Once your students have compiled a comprehensive checklist of the main features of a biography, allow them to use it to assess some biographies from your school library or on the internet using the feature checklist.

When students have assessed a selection of biographies, take some time as a class to discuss them. You can base the discussion around the following prompts:

• Which biographies covered all the criteria from their checklist?
• Which biographies didn’t?
• Which biography was the most readable in terms of structure?
• Which biography do you think was the least well-structured? How would you improve this?

Looking at how other writers have interpreted the form will help students internalize the necessary criteria before attempting to produce a biography. Once students have a clear understanding of the main features of the biography, they’re ready to begin work on writing a biography.

When the time does come to put pen to paper, be sure they’re armed with the following top tips to help ensure they’re as well prepared as possible.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 2:

This session aims to guide students through the process of selecting the perfect biography subject.

Instruct students to draw up a shortlist of three potential subjects for the biography they’ll write.

Using the three criteria mentioned in the writing guide (Interest, Merit, and Information), students award each potential subject a mark out of 5 for each of the criteria. In this manner, students can select the most suitable subject for their biography.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 3:

This session aims to get students into the researching phase, then prioritise and organise events chronologically.

Students begin by making a timeline of their subject’s life, starting with their birth and ending with their death or the present day. If the student has yet to make a final decision on the subject of their biography, a family member will often serve well for this exercise as a practice exercise.

Students should research and gather the key events of the person’s life, covering each period of their life from when they were a baby, through childhood and adolescence, right up to adulthood and old age. They should then organize these onto a timeline. Students can include photographs with captions if they have them.

They can present these to the class when they have finished their timelines.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 4:

Instruct students to look over their timeline, notes, and other research. Challenge them to identify three patterns that repeat throughout the subject’s life and sort all the related events and incidents into specific categories.

Students should then label each category with a single word. This is the thematic concept or the broad general underlying idea. After that, students should write a sentence or two expressing what the subject’s life ‘says’ about that concept.

This is known as the thematic statement . With the thematic concepts and thematic statements identified, the student now has some substantial ideas to explore that will help bring more profound meaning and wider resonance to their biography.

BIOGRAPHY LESSON IDEA # 5:

Instruct students to write a short objective account of an event in their own life. They can write about anyone from their past. It needn’t be more than a couple of paragraphs, but the writing should be strictly factual, focusing only on the objective details of what happened.

Once they have completed this, it’s time to rewrite the paragraph, but they should include some opinion and personal commentary this time.

The student here aims to inject some color and personality into their writing, to transform a detached, factual account into a warm, engaging story.

A COMPLETE UNIT ON TEACHING BIOGRAPHIES

Teach your students to write AMAZING BIOGRAPHIES & AUTOBIOGRAPHIES using proven RESEARCH SKILLS and WRITING STRATEGIES .

• Understand the purpose of both forms of biography.
• Explore the language and perspective of both.
• Prompts and Challenges to engage students in writing a biography.
• Dedicated lessons for both forms of biography.
• Biographical Projects can expand students’ understanding of reading and writing a biography.
• A COMPLETE 82-PAGE UNIT – NO PREPARATION REQUIRED.

FREE Biography Writing Graphic Organizer

Use this valuable tool in the research and writing phases to keep your students on track and engaged.

WRITING CHECKLIST & RUBRIC BUNDLE

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To Conclude

By this stage, your students should have an excellent technical overview of a biography’s essential elements.

They should be able to choose their subject in light of how interesting and worthy they are, as well as give consideration to the availability of information out there. They should be able to research effectively and identify emerging themes in their research notes. And finally, they should be able to bring some of their personality and uniqueness into their retelling of the life of another.

Remember that writing a biography is not only a great way to develop a student’s writing skills; it can be used in almost all curriculum areas. For example, to find out more about a historical figure in History, to investigate scientific contributions to Science, or to celebrate a hero from everyday life.

Biography is an excellent genre for students to develop their writing skills and to find inspiration in the lives of others in the world around them.

HOW TO WRITE A BIOGRAPHY TUTORIAL VIDEO

OTHER GREAT ARTICLES RELATED TO BIOGRAPHY WRITING

How to write an Autobiography

How to Write a Historical Recount Text

15 Awesome Recount & Personal Narrative Topics

Personal Narrative Writing Guide

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Biography in a Sentence  🔊

Definition of Biography

a person’s life story as told by another person

Examples of Biography in a sentence

It took me years to shape the president’s life story into an engaging biography.  🔊

Since the actress never asked you to write about her rise to stardom, your book isn’t an authorized biography.  🔊

The popular author will recount the singer’s upbringing in a biography.  🔊

In order for the writer to pen my biography, he’ll need to ask me numerous questions about my life.  🔊

Using my grandmother’s diaries, I was able to mesh her stories into a biography.  🔊

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• Cambridge Dictionary +Plus

Meaning of biography in English

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• This biography offers a few glimpses of his life before he became famous .
• Her biography revealed that she was not as rich as everyone thought .
• The biography was a bit of a rush job .
• The biography is an attempt to uncover the inner man.
• The biography is woven from the many accounts which exist of things she did.
• exercise book
• novelistically
• young adult

biography | American Dictionary

• biographical

Examples of biography

Translations of biography.

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under lock and key

locked away safely

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How to Write a Biography: A 7-Step Guide [+Template]

From time to time, nonfiction authors become so captivated by a particular figure from either the present or the past, that they feel compelled to write an entire book about their life. Whether casting them as heroes or villains, there is an interesting quality in their humanity that compels these authors to revisit their life paths and write their story.

However, portraying someone’s life on paper in a comprehensive and engaging way requires solid preparation. If you’re looking to write a biography yourself, in this post we’ll share a step-by-step blueprint that you can follow. 

How to write a biography: 

1. Seek permission when possible 

2. research your subject thoroughly, 3. do interviews and visit locations, 4. organize your findings, 5. identify a central thesis, 6. write it using narrative elements, 7. get feedback and polish the text.

FREE RESOURCE

Biography Outline Template

Craft a satisfying story arc for your biography with our free template.

While you technically don’t need permission to write about public figures (or deceased ones), that doesn't guarantee their legal team won't pursue legal action against you. Author Kitty Kelley was sued by Frank Sinatra before she even started to write His Way , a biography that paints Ol Blue Eyes in a controversial light. (Kelley ended up winning the lawsuit, however).  

Whenever feasible, advise the subject’s representatives of your intentions. If all goes according to plan, you’ll get a green light to proceed, or potentially an offer to collaborate. It's a matter of common sense; if someone were to write a book about you, you would likely want to know about it well prior to publication. So, make a sincere effort to reach out to their PR staff to negotiate an agreement or at least a mutual understanding of the scope of your project. 

At the same time, make sure that you still retain editorial control over the project, and not end up writing a puff piece that treats its protagonist like a saint or hero. No biography can ever be entirely objective, but you should always strive for a portrayal that closely aligns with facts and reality.

If you can’t get an answer from your subject, or you’re asked not to proceed forward, you can still accept the potential repercussions and write an unauthorized biography . The “rebellious act” of publishing without consent indeed makes for great marketing, though it’ll likely bring more headaches with it too. 

✋ Please note that, like other nonfiction books, if you intend to release your biography with a publishing house , you can put together a book proposal to send to them before you even write the book. If they like it enough, they might pay you an advance to write it.  

Book Proposal Template

Craft a professional pitch for your nonfiction book with our handy template.

Once you’ve settled (or not) the permission part, it’s time to dive deep into your character’s story.  

Deep and thorough research skills are the cornerstone of every biographer worth their salt. To paint a vivid and accurate portrait of someone's life, you’ll have to gather qualitative information from a wide range of reliable sources. 

Start with the information already available, from books on your subject to archival documents, then collect new ones firsthand by interviewing people or traveling to locations. 

Browse the web and library archives

Put your researcher hat on and start consuming any piece on your subject you can find, from their Wikipedia page to news articles, interviews, TV and radio appearances, YouTube videos, podcasts, books, magazines, and any other media outlets they may have been featured in. 

Establish a system to orderly collect the information you find 一 even seemingly insignificant details can prove valuable during the writing process, so be sure to save them. 

Depending on their era, you may find most of the information readily available online, or you may need to search through university libraries for older references. 

For his landmark biography of Alexander Hamilton, Ron Chernow spent untold hours at Columbia University’s library , reading through the Hamilton family papers, visiting the New York Historical Society, as well as interviewing the archivist of the New York Stock Exchange, and so on. The research process took years, but it certainly paid off. Chernow discovered that Hamilton created the first five securities originally traded on Wall Street. This finding, among others, revealed his significant contributions to shaping the current American financial and political systems, a legacy previously often overshadowed by other founding fathers. Today Alexander Hamilton is one of the best-selling biographies of all time, and it has become a cultural phenomenon with its own dedicated musical. 

Besides reading documents about your subject, research can help you understand the world that your subject lived in. 

Try to understand their time and social environment

Many biographies show how their protagonists have had a profound impact on society through their philosophical, artistic, or scientific contributions. But at the same time, it’s worth it as a biographer to make an effort to understand how their societal and historical context influenced their life’s path and work.

An interesting example is Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World . Finding himself limited by a lack of verified detail surrounding William Shakespeare's personal life, Greenblatt, instead, employs literary interpretation and imaginative reenactments to transport readers back to the Elizabethan era. The result is a vivid (though speculative) depiction of the playwright's life, enriching our understanding of his world.

Many readers enjoy biographies that transport them to a time and place, so exploring a historical period through the lens of a character can be entertaining in its own right. The Diary of Samuel Pepys became a classic not because people were enthralled by his life as an administrator, but rather from his meticulous and vivid documentation of everyday existence during the Restoration period.

Once you’ve gotten your hands on as many secondary sources as you can find, you’ll want to go hunting for stories first-hand from people who are (or were) close to your subject.

With all the material you’ve been through, by now you should already have a pretty good picture of your protagonist. But you’ll surely have some curiosities and missing dots in their character arc to figure out, which you can only get by interviewing primary sources.

Interview friends and associates

This part is more relevant if your subject is contemporary, and you can actually meet up or call with relatives, friends, colleagues, business partners, neighbors, or any other person related to them. 

In writing the popular biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson interviewed more than one hundred people, including Jobs’s family, colleagues, former college mates, business rivals, and the man himself.

🔍 Read other biographies to get a sense of what makes a great one. Check out our list of the 30 best biographies of all time , or take our 30-second quiz below for tips on which one you should read next. 

Which biography should you read next?

Discover the perfect biography for you. Takes 30 seconds!

When you conduct your interviews, make sure to record them with high quality audio you can revisit later. Then use tools like Otter.ai or Descript to transcribe them 一 it’ll save you countless hours. 

You can approach the interview with a specific set of questions, or follow your curiosity blindly, trying to uncover revealing stories and anecdotes about your subject. Whatever your method, author and biography editor Tom Bromley suggests that every interviewer arrives prepared, "Show that you’ve done your work. This will help to put the interviewee at ease, and get their best answers.” 

Bromley also places emphasis on the order in which you conduct interviews. “You may want to interview different members of the family or friends first, to get their perspective on something, and then go directly to the main interviewee. You'll be able to use that knowledge to ask sharper, more specific questions.” 

Finally, consider how much time you have with each interviewee. If you only have a 30-minute phone call with an important person, make it count by asking directly the most pressing questions you have. And, if you find a reliable source who is also particularly willing to help, conduct several interviews and ask them, if appropriate, to write a foreword as part of the book’s front matter .

Sometimes an important part of the process is packing your bags, getting on a plane, and personally visiting significant places in your character’s journey.

Visit significant places in their life

A place, whether that’s a city, a rural house, or a bodhi tree, can carry a particular energy that you can only truly experience by being there. In putting the pieces together about someone’s life, it may be useful to go visit where they grew up, or where other significant events of their lives happened. It will be easier to imagine what they experienced, and better tell their story. 

In researching The Lost City of Z , author David Grann embarked on a trek through the Amazon, retracing the steps of British explorer Percy Fawcett. This led Grann to develop new theories about the circumstances surrounding the explorer's disappearance.

Hopefully, you won’t have to deal with jaguars and anacondas to better understand your subject’s environment, but try to walk into their shoes as much as possible. 

Once you’ve researched your character enough, it’s time to put together all the puzzle pieces you collected so far. 

Take the bulk of notes, media, and other documents you’ve collected, and start to give them some order and structure. A simple way to do this is by creating a timeline. 

Create a chronological timeline

It helps to organize your notes chronologically 一 from childhood to the senior years, line up the most significant events of your subject’s life, including dates, places, names and other relevant bits. 

You should be able to divide their life into distinct periods, each with their unique events and significance. Based on that, you can start drafting an outline of the narrative you want to create.  

Draft a story outline 

Since a biography entails writing about a person’s entire life, it will have a beginning, a middle, and an end. You can pick where you want to end the story, depending on how consequential the last years of your subject were. But the nature of the work will give you a starting character arc to work with. 

To outline the story then, you could turn to the popular Three-Act Structure , which divides the narrative in three main parts. In a nutshell, you’ll want to make sure to have the following:

• Act 1. Setup : Introduce the protagonist's background and the turning points that set them on a path to achieve a goal. 
• Act 2. Confrontation : Describe the challenges they encounter, both internal and external, and how they rise to them. Then..
• Act 3. Resolution : Reach a climactic point in their story in which they succeed (or fail), showing how they (and the world around them) have changed as a result. 

Only one question remains before you begin writing: what will be the main focus of your biography?

Think about why you’re so drawn to your subject to dedicate years of your life to recounting their own. What aspect of their life do you want to highlight? Is it their evil nature, artistic genius, or visionary mindset? And what evidence have you got to back that up? Find a central thesis or focus to weave as the main thread throughout your narrative. 

Or find a unique angle

If you don’t have a particular theme to explore, finding a distinct angle on your subject’s story can also help you distinguish your work from other biographies or existing works on the same subject.

Plenty of biographies have been published about The Beatles 一 many of which have different focuses and approaches: 

• Philip Norman's Shout is sometimes regarded as leaning more towards a pro-Lennon and anti-McCartney stance, offering insights into the band's inner dynamics. 
• Ian McDonald's Revolution in the Head closely examines their music track by track, shifting the focus back to McCartney as a primary creative force. 
• Craig Brown's One Two Three Four aims to capture their story through anecdotes, fan letters, diary entries, and interviews. 
• Mark Lewisohn's monumental three-volume biography, Tune In , stands as a testament to over a decade of meticulous research, chronicling every intricate detail of the Beatles' journey.

Finally, consider that biographies are often more than recounting the life of a person. Similar to how Dickens’ Great Expectations is not solely about a boy named Pip (but an examination and critique of Britain’s fickle, unforgiving class system), a biography should strive to illuminate a broader truth — be it social, political, or human — beyond the immediate subject of the book. 

Once you’ve identified your main focus or angle, it’s time to write a great story. 

While biographies are often highly informative, they do not have to be dry and purely expository in nature . You can play with storytelling elements to make it an engaging read. 

You could do that by thoroughly detailing the setting of the story , depicting the people involved in the story as fully-fledged characters , or using rising action and building to a climax when describing a particularly significant milestone of the subject’s life. 

One common way to make a biography interesting to read is starting on a strong foot…

Hook the reader from the start

Just because you're honoring your character's whole life doesn't mean you have to begin when they said their first word. Starting from the middle or end of their life can be more captivating as it introduces conflicts and stakes that shaped their journey.

When he wrote about Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild , author Jon Krakauer didn’t open his subject’s childhood and abusive family environment. Instead, the book begins with McCandless hitchhiking his way into the wilderness, and subsequently being discovered dead in an abandoned bus. By starting in medias res , Krakauer hooks the reader’s interest, before tracing back the causes and motivations that led McCandless to die alone in that bus in the first place.

You can bend the timeline to improve the reader’s reading experience throughout the rest of the story too…

Play with flashback 

While biographies tend to follow a chronological narrative, you can use flashbacks to tell brief stories or anecdotes when appropriate. For example, if you were telling the story of footballer Lionel Messi, before the climax of winning the World Cup with Argentina, you could recall when he was just 13 years old, giving an interview to a local newspaper, expressing his lifelong dream of playing for the national team. 

Used sparsely and intentionally, flashbacks can add more context to the story and keep the narrative interesting. Just like including dialogue does…

Reimagine conversations

Recreating conversations that your subject had with people around them is another effective way to color the story. Dialogue helps the reader imagine the story like a movie, providing a deeper sensory experience. 

One thing is trying to articulate the root of Steve Jobs’ obsession with product design, another would be to quote his father , teaching him how to build a fence when he was young: “You've got to make the back of the fence just as good looking as the front of the fence. Even though nobody will see it, you will know. And that will show that you're dedicated to making something perfect.”

Unlike memoirs and autobiographies, in which the author tells the story from their personal viewpoint and enjoys greater freedom to recall conversations, biographies require a commitment to facts. So, when recreating dialogue, try to quote directly from reliable sources like personal diaries, emails, and text messages. You could also use your interview scripts as an alternative to dialogue. As Tom Bromley suggests, “If you talk with a good amount of people, you can try to tell the story from their perspective, interweaving different segments and quoting the interviewees directly.”

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These are just some of the story elements you can use to make your biography more compelling. Once you’ve finished your manuscript, it’s a good idea to ask for feedback. 

If you’re going to self-publish your biography, you’ll have to polish it to professional standards. After leaving your work to rest for a while, look at it with fresh eyes and self-edit your manuscript eliminating passive voice, filler words, and redundant adverbs. 

Then, have a professional editor give you a general assessment. They’ll look at the structure and shape of your manuscript and tell you which parts need to be expanded on or cut. As someone who edited and commissioned several biographies, Tom Bromley points out that a professional “will look at the sources used and assess whether they back up the points made, or if more are needed. They would also look for context, and whether or not more background information is needed for the reader to understand the story fully. And they might check your facts, too.”  

In addition to structural editing, you may want to have someone copy-edit and proofread your work.

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Importantly, make sure to include a bibliography with a list of all the interviews, documents, and sources used in the writing process. You’ll have to compile it according to a manual of style, but you can easily create one by using tools like EasyBib . Once the text is nicely polished and typeset in your writing software , you can prepare for the publication process.  

In conclusion, by mixing storytelling elements with diligent research, you’ll be able to breathe life into a powerful biography that immerses readers in another individual’s life experience. Whether that’ll spark inspiration or controversy, remember you could have an important role in shaping their legacy 一 and that’s something not to take lightly. 

Continue reading

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Definition of bio

 (Entry 1 of 2)

Definition of bio-  (Entry 2 of 2)

Examples of bio in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'bio.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1947, in the meaning defined above

Dictionary Entries Near bio

bioabsorbable

Cite this Entry

“Bio.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bio. Accessed 28 Apr. 2024.

Kids Definition

Kids definition of bio-.

Combining form

from Greek bi-, bio- "life"

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Nglish: Translation of bio for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of bio for Arabic Speakers

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Biography in a sentence

• 某某   2016-01-13 联网相关的政策
• replay  (139+4)
• paisley  (58)
• exemption  (166+6)
• pencil case  (22)
• outside  (267+88)
• gone  (251+50)
• eggplant  (93+2)
• glowworm  (20)
• dynamo  (65+3)
• ounce  (154+4)
• inversion  (169)
• porcupine  (36)
• riddle  (84+6)
• theism  (26+1)
• suffix  (96+2)
• inflexion  (17)
• postposition  (17)
• stagnancy  (25)
• life cycle  (242+1)
• prayer  (188+7)

BIOGRAPHY in a Sentence

Learn BIOGRAPHY from example sentences, some of them are from classic books. These examples are selected from a corpus with 300,000 sentences, including classic works and current mainstream media. Some sentences also link to their contexts. For BIOGRAPHY, below is one of 19 sentences: The usual custom in biography is to begin with the brightest side and to leave the faults to be discovered afterwards.

Biography used in a sentence

Biography in a sentence as a noun.

One of the things that struck me while reading Jobs' biography was how frequently he cried.

Theories on Jobs' character aside, the Jobs biography is an utter mess.

A great biography IMO, but it's not much about technology.

For those who haven't yet, I'd highly recommend reading "Steve Jobs", the biography by Isaacson.

He was so private, and for good reason, and until the biography comes out these are some of the few views we have to him as a person.

The rest of the portrayal of him being some super human is also completely in opposition with his biography.

I hate to make a "me too" like post, but as soon as I read his biography, I thought "... wait we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?

In his biography he talks about the importance of Apple generating a profit in order to re-invest into producing new products.

Read the Pulitzer-prize winning biography "The Powerbroker" if you want a lesson in how to abuse the public's ignorance through the cunning drafting of legislation.

I don't like this article's groundless speculation about Albert Einstein, who is used as an unwilling poster child for dozens of causes without support in Einstein's actual biography.

From the Isaacson biography:Jobs described the type of glass Apple wanted for the iPhone, and Weeks told him that Corning had developed a chemical exchange process in the 1960s that led to what they dubbed gorilla glass.

I realize I'm probably being too harsh, but I wish that I felt like Isaacson had invested into this biography, this once-in-a-lifetime-opportunity, the way Jobs likely invested in developing any of his products.

The Timeframe series starts much earlier than the Durant's, but once both series were in sync I would read the books in both series for an epoch, as well as at least two other books, either written in the era or about the era, drawing mostly from science, culture, and biography.

The original model of university student was the one Westfall described in his excellent biography of Newton: "a plodding group, narrowly vocational in outlook, lower-class youths grimly intent on ecclesiastical preferment as the means to advancement.

Biography definitions

an account of the series of events making up a person's life

See also: life

Harvey Weinstein’s New York Conviction Is Overturned

The state’s top court ruled that Mr. Weinstein, the disgraced Hollywood producer whose sexual abuse case incited the #MeToo movement, did not receive a fair trial. A separate 16-year sentence in California was not affected.

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Maria Cramer

Here are five takeaways from the overturned conviction.

In a 4-to-3 decision on Thursday, New York’s highest court overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crime charges , a reversal that horrified and dismayed many of the women whose decision to speak out against Mr. Weinstein, a prominent Hollywood producer, accelerated the #MeToo movement.

The New York Court of Appeals agreed with Mr. Weinstein’s defense team that the trial judge who presided over the sex crimes case in Manhattan, Justice James Burke, made a critical error when he let prosecutors call as witnesses several women who testified that Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, even though none of those allegations had led to charges.

The women became known as Molineux witnesses, a term that refers to trial witnesses who are allowed to testify about criminal acts that the defendant has not been charged with committing. In writing for the majority, Judge Jenny Rivera said permitting such testimony in Mr. Weinstein’s case had served to wrongly “diminish defendant’s character before the jury.”

The ruling, four years after Mr. Weinstein was convicted of forcibly performing oral sex on a production assistant and of raping an actress, did not surprise many legal analysts who had questioned whether prosecutors had taken too big a risk in their efforts to win over the jury.

The Harvey Weinstein Appeal Ruling, Annotated

Read the ruling from New York’s top court that overturned the 2020 conviction of Harvey Weinstein on felony sex crime charges in Manhattan, with context and explanation by New York Times journalists.

In its decision, the court came to the conclusion that prosecutors had done just that and, along with Justice Burke, had violated a central tenet of criminal trials: Defendants should be judged only on the charges against them.

Here are five takeaways from the court’s ruling:

The court cited “egregious errors.”

The court said the trial’s fairness had been compromised by two key prosecution strategies: the use of Molineux witnesses and the prosecutors’ disclosure that if Mr. Weinstein took the stand in his own defense, they would ask him about dozens of allegations of other crimes and boorish, frightening behavior.

Before the trial, during what is known as a Sandoval hearing, Justice Burke said he would let prosecutors question Mr. Weinstein about 28 allegations that included physically attacking his brother, threatening to cut off a colleague’s genitals with gardening shears, throwing a table of food, and screaming and cursing at hotel restaurant staff after they told him the kitchen was closed.

That threat made it impossible for Mr. Weinstein to take the stand even though he was “begging” to testify in his own defense, his lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said during oral arguments before the Court of Appeals in February.

In its majority opinion, the court agreed.

“The threat of a cross-examination highlighting these untested allegations undermined defendant’s right to testify,” Judge Rivera wrote. “The remedy for these egregious errors is a new trial.”

The three dissenting judges slammed the majority.

Three judges — Madeline Singas, Anthony Cannataro and Michael J. Garcia — dissented in a pair of scathing opinions that accused the majority of continuing “a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”

The judges said the court had ignored evidence that the Molineux witnesses had established: that Mr. Weinstein had displayed a pattern of coercion and manipulation.

Judge Singas said the ruling would make it harder to use such witnesses in future sexual assault cases.

“Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” she wrote.

Judge Cannataro said the additional witnesses the prosecution had presented had helped upend the still-pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

The case clearly caused tension among the court, evident in a series of back-and-forth statements between the judges, with the majority defending itself against the dissenters’ claims that the ruling weakened the ability of accusers to push their cases through the criminal court system.

“We do not ‘shut eyes to the enduring effect of rape culture on notions of consent, and intent,’” Judge Rivera wrote, referring to part of Judge Singas’s dissent. “On the contrary, consistent with our judicial role, our analysis is grounded on bedrock principles of evidence and the defendant’s constitutional right to the presumption of innocence and a fair trial.”

Victims and activists are devastated but remain determined.

Dawn Dunning, one of the Molineux witnesses who testified against Mr. Weinstein, said she was asked after the ruling if she regretted testifying.

“My answer is a resounding ‘no,’” she said in a statement. “I am a stronger person for having done so, and I know that other women found strength and courage because I and other Weinstein survivors confronted him publicly. The culture has changed, and I am confident that there is no going back.”

She and others encouraged Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, to retry the case. The 2020 case was tried under Cyrus R. Vance Jr., Mr. Bragg’s predecessor. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Bragg said that he would retry the case.

Ashley Judd , the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, called the news “unfair to survivors.”

“We still live in our truth,” she said. “And we know what happened.”

Ms. Judd appeared with several other sexual assault survivors and activists on Thursday at a hastily arranged news conference on the 29th floor of the Millennium Hilton in Midtown.

Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo, said one of the overarching goals of the movement — to get the court system to take sexual assault cases more seriously — is “long, strategic and thoughtful.”

“The bad thing about survivors is there are so many of us,” she said. “But the good thing about survivors is that there are so many of us.”

Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in California still stands.

Mr. Weinstein, who had been serving a 23-year sentence at Mohawk Correctional Facility in upstate New York, learned about the decision after someone at the prison showed him a news report about the ruling, according to his lawyer, Mr. Aidala.

He talked to Mr. Aidala just after 10 a.m., about an hour after the ruling came down.

Mr. Aidala said Mr. Weinstein “wasn’t emotional, like crying,” but he was “very gracious, very grateful.”

Even with the conviction overturned, Mr. Weinstein is not a free man. He is still facing a 16-year sentence in California, where a jury convicted him in 2022 of raping a woman in a Beverly Hills hotel . He was to serve that term after his New York sentence. Now, he could be transferred to California, but he will most likely be transferred from state prison to Rikers Island, the jail complex in New York City, as he waits for Mr. Bragg to decide whether to push for another trial.

… But he will soon appeal it.

After Thursday’s decision came down, Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer in California, Jennifer Bonjean, said she expected the ruling to help him when he appeals his California conviction on May 20.

A jury in Los Angeles Superior Court deadlocked on charges of sexual battery by restraint, forcible oral copulation and forcible rape in December 2022. Those charges were related to accusations brought by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, a documentary filmmaker and the wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, and Lauren Young, a model and screenwriter.

But the jury found Mr. Weinstein guilty on three other counts — rape, forcible oral sex and sexual penetration — involving an Italian actress who testified that he attacked her in a hotel room in 2013. The jury acquitted Mr. Weinstein of one count of sexual battery involving a massage therapist.

In that case, as in New York, prosecutors were allowed to use witnesses who accused Mr. Weinstein of sex crimes that he had not been charged with. However, the laws around such witnesses are different in California.

Jurors in the California trial were “overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate, that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective,” Ms. Bonjean said.

Jodi Kantor , Jan Ransom , Chelsia Rose Marcius and Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.

Claire Fahy

Lindsay Goldbrum, a lawyer who has represented a number of Weinstein’s accusers, said in a statement that the witness testimony at issue was crucial to rebutting the defense’s assertion that the sexual encounters were consensual. The ruling today “will undoubtedly deter future sexual assault victims from coming forward,” she said.

Hurubie Meko

Weinstein’s lawyer Arthur Aidala said he would be brought to a facility closer to New York City in preparation for a new case, and then “we start from scratch.”

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Benjamin Weiser

What is the Court of Appeals, and how does it work?

The Court of Appeals, which handed down the Weinstein ruling on Thursday, is New York’s highest court — and thus gets the final say on cases in the state before a party may seek review by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The appeals court’s seven members include a chief judge, Rowan Wilson , and six associate judges. The judges’ vote to overturn Weinstein’s conviction was 4-to-3.

In order for Harvey Weinstein to have the appeals court hear his case after he was found guilty in a Manhattan trial in 2020, he first had to appeal to an intermediate court — called the appellate division. A panel of that court unanimously upheld Mr. Weinstein’s conviction in 2022. From there, he then could pursue his case in the Court of Appeals.

According to Thursday’s ruling, two associate judges on the Court of Appeals did not participate in the Weinstein decision; they were replaced by two justices from the appellate division.

Weinstein learned about the decision after someone showed him a news report that said his conviction had been reversed, his lawyer Arthur Aidala said.

Mr. Weinstein’s criminal convictions in California still stand.

A decision by New York’s highest court to overturn the 2020 sex crimes conviction of Harvey Weinstein has upended a criminal case that helped ignite the #MeToo movement. But that conviction was just one of two secured against Mr. Weinstein in recent years.

In the other case, brought by prosecutors in Los Angeles in January 2020 , Mr. Weinstein was accused of rape and other crimes, convicted and ultimately sentenced to 16 years in prison , with the term to begin after his New York sentence. Mr. Weinstein is expected to appeal the California conviction next month, said his lawyer Jennifer Bonjean.

Ms. Bonjean added that she thinks Thursday’s decision — which found that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with but also for past behavior — will bolster the appeal in Los Angeles.

“The New York decision relates to the excessive use of other accusers — and the concept of uncharged accusers and bad acts is equally applicable in the L.A. case,” Ms. Bonjean said.

In the Los Angeles case, prosecutors called 44 witnesses, including four women who said they had been assaulted by Mr. Weinstein and were allowed to testify to show a pattern of abuse, though their accounts were not tied to the charges.

“They were overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective,” Ms. Bonjean said of the jurors in that case.

Ms. Bonjean, who represented Bill Cosby in the successful appeal of his sexual assault conviction, also said that the Los Angeles prosecutors erred by informing the jury that Mr. Weinstein had been convicted in New York, which might have unfairly swayed jurors.

“That turned the presumption of innocence on its head and tainted the entire trial and was even used to enhance his sentencing,” said Ms. Bonjean, who added that she expected to file an appeal in the California case on May 20.

The California prosecution in Los Angeles Superior Court focused in part on allegations that Mr. Weinstein raped a woman identified as Jane Doe 1 in a hotel room in February 2013. He was convicted in December 2022 of forcible rape, forcible oral copulation and sexual penetration by a foreign object. But he was not convicted on four other counts.

At his sentencing, Mr. Weinstein pleaded for leniency, telling the judge that the case against him was not solid and did not justify a long prison term.

“I tried all my life to bring happiness to people,” Mr. Weinstein said in court. “Please don’t sentence me to life in prison. I don’t deserve it.”

Jane Manning, the director of the Women’s Equal Justice Project and a former sex crimes prosecutor, said that the appeals court decision in New York should not affect the case in Los Angeles.

“California law explicitly permits prosecutors to show that a defendant’s sexually predatory conduct is part of a pattern,” Ms. Manning said. “They explicitly permit evidence of similar crimes to be admitted in sex assault cases because they understand just how relevant this evidence is.”

Ms. Manning said that New York, on the other hand, does not have a statute that guides courts on this issue and “so it is left completely to the courts to determine what is and isn’t permissible when it comes to evidence of similar crimes.”

It was unclear on Thursday just when Weinstein would be transferred to a California prison. A spokesman for the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, which runs the prison where he is now in custody, said the agency was “reviewing the court decision.”

Duncan Levin, a former New York prosecutor who was briefly part of Weinstein’s legal team, said in a statement: “This is how the court system is supposed to work: fundamental due process for everyone without fear or favor. The New York Court of Appeals adhered to the basic principles of rule of law, and that was not an easy thing to do here.”

At a news conference outside Manhattan’s Criminal Courts Building, where Weinstein was convicted in 2020, Arthur Aidala, one of Weinstein’s lawyers, said that from the start his team “knew that Harvey Weinstein did not get a fair trial.”

Aidala called Judge Jenny Rivera, who wrote the decision, a “real hero for women.” The decision, he said, stated that “you can’t convict someone based on their entire life.”

Weinstein will now be able to return to court and tell his side without having “so much baggage” from his past divulged to the jury, Aidala said. “He’s been dying to tell his story from Day 1,” he said.

Weinstein is slated to appeal his California conviction on May 20, according to his lawyer Jennifer Bonjean, who said that she expected that today’s ruling would bolster his appeal in that case. She said jurors were “overwhelmed with this bad character evidence that was not legitimate, that tainted the whole trial in California from our perspective.”

The Model Alliance, a labor rights group focused on young women in the fashion industry, criticized the ruling in a news conference on Zoom. Carré Otis, a model who is on the group’s board, described herself as “sickened” by the decision. “As an advocate, I’m fired up,” she added.

Sara Ziff, the executive director of the Model Alliance, called on lawmakers in Albany to pass the Fashion Workers Act, which would provide labor protections for models, before the end of the legislative session on June 6. “While today’s news is devastating, it only strengthens our commitment to reforming industries predominantly made up of young women,” she said.

In their dissents, three judges offer sharp critiques of the majority’s decision.

In a pair of scathing opinions, three judges on the New York Court of Appeals who dissented in the court’s ruling to overturn Harvey Weinstein’s conviction accused the majority of continuing “a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.”

Madeline Singas, one of the dissenting judges, said the majority of the court had ignored the evidence that showed Mr. Weinstein’s affinity for “manipulation and premeditation.”

Worse, she wrote, the court had made it harder for victims to hold their assailants accountable in future cases.

“Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” Judge Singas wrote.

She joined Judges Anthony Cannataro and Michael J. Garcia in the dissent. Judge Garcia did not write his own opinion, but agreed with the other two dissenting judges.

In his dissent, Judge Cannataro said that the additional witnesses the prosecution presented — who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them but whose accusations were not part of the charges against him — had been vital to show Mr. Weinstein’s pattern of manipulation and coercion.

Their testimony, he wrote, helped upend the still-pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

In the Manhattan trial, Justice James Burke was careful in his decision to let prosecutors present evidence that showed that more “complex psychological and sociological dynamics” were at play, Judge Cannataro wrote.

The decision to overturn the conviction “represents an unfortunate step backward from recent advances in our understanding of how sex crimes are perpetrated and why victims sometimes respond in seemingly counterintuitive ways,” Judge Cannataro wrote.

Judge Singas said that the witness testimony of the additional women, who described their disgust and horror at Mr. Weinstein’s advances, had made it clearer to the jury that the former producer had to have known that he did not have the women’s consent.

“Their testimony explained the idiosyncrasies of the entertainment industry that allow assaults to be perpetrated by influential and powerful men against young and relatively powerless aspiring actresses,” Judge Singas wrote.

The majority appeared to take umbrage with the fierce statements of the dissenting judges, defending their ruling in numerous footnotes and throughout the opinion, a back-and-forth that suggested the decision had given rise to considerable tension among the judges.

Judge Jenny Rivera, who wrote for the majority, said Judge Singas “misconstrues” their analysis of why the additional witnesses were not needed to combat “rape myths.”

She pushed back on Judge Singas’s assertions that the court had made it harder for future victims to have their cases prosecuted, calling them “exaggerated claims.”

Weinstein’s team is scheduled to hold a news conference at 1:30 p.m. at the park across the street from Manhattan’s Criminal Courts building, where the trial of Donald J. Trump is underway inside. The area is surrounded by security and camera banks of press.

Maia Coleman

Sarah Ann Masse, an actress who in 2017 accused Weinstein of sexually assaulting her and who has founded an organization supporting survivors of sexual abuse in Hollywood, said in a statement that today’s decision reflects a broader failure of the justice system to support survivors.

“Abusers are given chance after chance to get back to their ‘normal lives’ while survivors continue to suffer from a lack of support, prolonged trauma, chronic illness, mental health struggles, economic harm and various forms of retaliation,” she said.

Reached by phone, Donna Rotunno, Weinstein’s lead trial attorney in New York, lauded the court’s decision. “From Day 1 of this I have said they were prosecuting him for sins, not crimes,” she said. “I think it’s bigger than Weinstein; this speaks to our justice system as a whole. The court ruling says to prosecutors: Winning at all costs is not your job. Your job is to put on a fair trial.”

Chelsia Rose Marcius

Fatima Goss Graves, the chief executive of the National Women’s Law Center, said at a news conference in Manhattan that today’s decision would only invigorate the #MeToo movement. “One well-known case does not define this movement,” she said.

Despite their visibly deep disappointment about today’s decision, Judd, Burke and Graves are composed and smiling. All said they took solace in their strong bond. Burke said movements like #MeToo are “long, strategic and thoughtful.” She added: “The bad thing about survivors is there are so many of us. But the good thing about survivors is that there are so many of us.”

Weinstein’s accusers express fury and disappointment over the court’s ruling.

Several women who have accused Harvey Weinstein of sex crimes or harassment expressed a range of emotions on Thursday morning after New York’s highest court overturned Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 conviction.

It’s “a terrible reminder that victims of sexual assault just don’t get justice,” said Katherine Kendall , an actress who accused Mr. Weinstein of luring her to what she believed would be a work discussion in 1993. Instead, she said, he chased her around his New York apartment while he was nude. “I’m completely let down by the justice system right now,” she added. “I’m sort of flabbergasted.”

Ambra Battilana Gutierrez , a Filipino Italian model, had accused Mr. Weinstein of grabbing her breasts and putting his hands up her skirt in 2015 during a business meeting at his office in Manhattan, but the Manhattan district attorney’s office decided not to charge him .

“If the D.A. had taken my case seriously in 2015, we wouldn’t be here,” Ms. Battilana Gutierrez said on Thursday. “This is an ongoing failure of the justice system — and the courts — to take survivors seriously and to protect our interests.”

Amber Tamblyn, an actress, writer and director who has been outspoken during the #MeToo movement , was flooded with anger when she learned of Thursday’s decision, calling it “a loss to the entire community of women who put their lives and careers on the line to speak out.”

Tomi-Ann Roberts, a professor of psychology at Colorado College, said the ruling infuriated her but did not shock her. She had accused Mr. Weinstein of sexually harassing her during an encounter at a hotel in 1984 that she believed was a business meeting.

“The only thing I can hope with this is that it re-energizes the #MeToo movement to demand that the criminal and civil justice systems do better at holding perpetrators accountable for this range of activities that are all degrading and all should be illegal,” said Dr. Roberts, whose research focuses on the consequences of sexual objectification.

Ms. Kendall added that sexual assault victims “who go up against powerful men rarely get justice.”

“But the important thing is that we do not stop speaking out,” she said. “Our culture needs to keep supporting silence breakers.”

Jodi Kantor , Jan Ransom and Maria Cramer contributed reporting.

Michael Osgood, the former head of the New York Police Department’s special victims division, who led a team of 25 detectives in the Weinstein investigation, said that the decision today was a result of missteps by the former Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance. “We built a rock-solid case,” he said of the 2015 case involving the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez. “Harvey Weinstein was able to penetrate the district attorney’s office and cover that assault up.”

The actress Ashley Judd is speaking now at a news conference in Manhattan. This morning, she said, she heard the news from my colleague Jodi Kantor. Judd said she was stunned. “This is what it's like to be a woman in America,”she said, “living with male entitlement to our bodies.”

Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, said this news conference was pulled together quickly in response to the ruling. Many people, she said, had thought that the original verdict represented a change in how the justice system operates. “This moment makes it feel like we were wrong.”

Nicole Hong

The appeals court agreed with Weinstein that the trial judge violated his right to testify in his own defense. The trial judge had ruled that if Weinstein took the stand, prosecutors would be allowed to question him about a long history of bad behavior, including allegations that he threw food at an employee and punched his brother at a business meeting. The appeals ruling said this “impermissibly” affected Weinstein’s decision not to testify at trial.

William Rashbaum

Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the former Manhattan district attorney who oversaw the investigation and prosecution of Weinstein, said in a lengthy statement that he was “shocked” by the decision, which he said “did not advance justice.”

Of Weinstein’s victims, he said, “I am deeply grateful to and humbled by the survivors who came forward in the brightest glare of a public courtroom to tell their stories at great personal cost and trauma,” adding, “The judicial system, in my opinion, has let them down today.”

Vance, noting that Weinstein’s conviction was previously upheld by a lower appeals court in “a thoughtful and unanimous opinion,” said the witness testimony at issue “was fair and necessary to explain to the jury how and why these women were repeatedly victimized.” He also said those witnesses were just a fraction of the women victimized by Weinstein over years of abuse.

The model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, who had accused Weinstein of groping her breast and putting his hand up her skirt, said in a statement: “If the D.A. had taken my case seriously in 2015, we wouldn’t be here. This is an ongoing failure of the justice system — and the courts — to take survivors seriously and to protect our interests.”

Justice Madeline Singas wrote a fiery dissent that accused the court of making it more difficult for victims to seek justice against their assailants. “Men who serially sexually exploit their power over women — especially the most vulnerable groups in society — will reap the benefit of today’s decision,” she wrote.

Justice Anthony Cannataro, who also dissented, wrote that the additional witnesses the prosecution presented were vital to show Weinstein’s pattern of manipulation and coercion. Their testimony helped upend the still pervasive notion that a sexual assault must involve “the stereotypical stranger in a dark alley who isolates his victim or waits for her to be alone before launching a violent assault.”

Weinstein has been held in semi-protective custody at Mohawk Correctional Facility east of Syracuse, where he has spent his days reading and studying the law, his spokesman said.

Weinstein, who has diabetes, eye problems and heart issues, has used a walker in prison and was housed in a medical unit, his spokesman said. “He’s been to the hospital for his eye issues,” said the spokesman, Juda Engelmayer. “He has been going through bouts of difficulty.”

Testimony by these witnesses was a key part of Weinstein’s appeal argument.

Central to the decision to overturn the conviction of Harvey Weinstein was something called “Molineux witnesses.” That term refers to witnesses in a trial who are allowed to testify about criminal acts that the defendant has not been charged with committing.

During the trial, prosecutors sought to persuade jurors that Mr. Weinstein had a long history of using his prominence as a Hollywood producer to lure young women to hotel rooms and sexually assault them.

They did this by calling other women to the stand who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them, including Dawn Dunning, Tarale Wulff and Lauren Young . Mr. Weinstein was not charged with assaulting those women, but Justice James Burke allowed them to appear for the prosecution as Molineux witnesses, also known as “prior bad act” witnesses.

The legal standard for prior bad acts in New York State dates back to the case of a chemist named Roland B. Molineux , who was convicted in 1900 of sending a bottle full of cyanide to the director of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club , with whom he had a personal feud. The cyanide killed a woman who was living with the club director and took the poison, believing it was a medicine.

During Mr. Molineux’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence that he had previously poisoned another rival in the same manner, with a mailed tin of poison masquerading as medicine. He was never charged with the earlier crime.

A year later, the Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in a landmark decision that said the state could not present evidence about a defendant’s other alleged crimes. Jurors, the court ruled, would believe a defendant “was guilty of the crime charged because he had committed other, similar crimes in the past.”

But exceptions to the ruling were laid out. For instance, a judge could admit such evidence to establish a motive for the crime being tried, to prove the crime wasn’t an innocent mistake or to establish a common scheme or plan.

Before letting the evidence in, the judge would have to weigh the extent to which the evidence helped to prove that the crime was part of a pattern, versus how prejudicial the effect on the jury would be, the court decided.

But those are both highly subjective judgments, according to legal experts. And that leaves defendants like Mr. Weinstein ample ground to challenge a guilty verdict in higher courts.

Jonah Bromwich

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a statement: “We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault.”

A spokesman for Weinstein said the lawyers will respond to the New York Court of Appeals decision at 1:30 p.m. on the steps of the criminal courthouse at 100 Centre Street.

Here’s a timeline of Weinstein’s New York case.

March 27, 2015 : Prosecutors in Manhattan decline to prosecute Harvey Weinstein after a Filipino Italian model, Ambra Battilana Gutierrez, tells the police that Mr. Weinstein groped her breast and slid his hand up her skirt during a business meeting at his office in Manhattan. The Manhattan district attorney at the time, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., reaches the decision despite a secret recording obtained by Ms. Battilana Gutierrez in which Mr. Weinstein can be heard apologizing and offering what seems like an admission.

Oct. 5, 2017 : Investigations by The New York Times and The New Yorker reveal accusations that Mr. Weinstein mistreated women and that his company covered it up.

March 19, 2018 : Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York orders a review of the decision not to charge Mr. Weinstein in 2015, calling Mr. Vance’s decision-making into question.

April 25, 2018 : Mr. Vance assigns a new prosecutor to lead the investigation.

May 25, 2018 : Mr. Weinstein surrenders to the police after being indicted on charges of rape and criminal sexual act. The rape charge stems from an alleged assault on an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, at a Manhattan hotel in 2013. The criminal sexual act charge involves Lucia Evans, a marketing executive who told investigators that Mr. Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex on him during a meeting in his office in 2004.

July 2, 2018 : Prosecutors add charges against Mr. Weinstein related to accusations that he forced oral sex on Miriam Haley, a former production assistant on the television show “Project Runway,” in his Manhattan apartment in July 2006.

Oct. 11, 2018 : A judge dismisses the forcible oral sex charge against Mr. Weinstein involving Ms. Evans after prosecutors acknowledge that the lead detective in the case withheld pertinent information that a witness had cast doubt on Ms. Evans’s account.

Aug. 26, 2019 : Prosecutors obtain a new indictment against Mr. Weinstein, allowing them to call as a witness Annabella Sciorra, an actress who said that Mr. Weinstein raped her at her Manhattan apartment in 1993 or 1994.

Jan. 6, 2020 : Mr. Weinstein is indicted in Los Angeles, where he is accused of raping one woman and groping and masturbating in front of a second within two days in February 2013. The California charges are filed the same day that the legal parties in Mr. Weinstein’s New York trial first gather in Manhattan to discuss jury selection and other legal matters.

Feb. 18, 2020 : After a monthlong trial in which they hear testimony from Ms. Sciorra, Ms. Haley and Ms. Mann, among other people, jurors in New York began deliberations.

Feb. 24, 2020 : The jury, consisting of five men and seven women, finds Mr. Weinstein guilty of rape and criminal sexual act but acquits him on three other counts, including the two most serious charges against him: being a sexual predator.

March 11, 2020 : Mr. Weinstein is sentenced to 23 years in prison. His first stop in New York’s penal system is the notorious Rikers Island jail complex where he becomes inmate No. 3102000153.

April 10, 2020 : Prosecutors in California add a charge against Mr. Weinstein, alleging that he committed an assault at a Beverly Hills hotel in May 2010.

April 5, 2021 : Mr. Weinstein appeals his New York conviction, saying several women who had accused him of sexual assault should not have been allowed to testify.

June 2, 2022 : A New York appeals court upholds Mr. Weinstein’s 2020 conviction on felony sex crimes in a unanimous decision.

Dec. 19, 2022 : After a trial that began in October 2022, jurors in Los Angeles return a mixed verdict, finding Mr. Weinstein guilty of raping and sexually assaulting an actress in 2013, but not guilty of one other charge. They are unable to reach a decision on three additional counts.

Feb. 23, 2023 : Mr. Weinstein is sentenced to 16 years in prison in the Los Angeles case, with that prison term to begin after he serves his time in New York.

April 25, 2024 : New York’s highest court overturns the 2020 conviction, ruling that Mr. Weinstein was not tried solely on the crimes he was charged with, but instead for much of his past behavior.

Jodi Kantor

Jodi Kantor has been reporting on Harvey Weinstein since 2017, when she and Megan Twohey revealed decades of abuse allegations against him.

News analysis

Harvey Weinstein’s conviction was fragile from the start.

The overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s New York sex crimes conviction on Thursday morning may feel like a shocking reversal, but the criminal case against him has been fragile since the day it was filed. Prosecutors moved it forward with risky, boundary-pushing bets. New York’s top judges, many of them female, have held rounds of pained debates over whether his conviction was clean.

“I’m not shocked,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former Manhattan prosecutor who is now a law professor at Northwestern, in an interview. The issue of whether Mr. Weinstein’s trial was fair “is a really close question that could have gone either way.”

Outside the justice system, evidence of Mr. Weinstein’s sexual misconduct is overwhelming. After The New York Times revealed allegations of abuse by the producer in 2017, nearly 100 women came forward with accounts of pressure and manipulation by Mr. Weinstein. Their stories sparked the global #MeToo reckoning.

But while Mr. Weinstein’s alleged victims could fill an entire courtroom, few of them could stand at the center of a New York criminal trial. Many of the horror stories were about sexual harassment, which is a civil violation, not a criminal one. Some were from out of state, especially California. Others fell beyond the statute of limitations. One of the original accusers was dropped from the trial because of allegations of police misconduct.

Manhattan prosecutors, under pressure for not pursuing charges earlier, made a series of gambles.

First, they proceeded with a trial based on only two victims, who accused him of sexually assaulting them but also admitted to having consensual sex with him at other times — a combination that many experts say is too messy to win convictions . To prove their case against Mr. Weinstein, who denies all allegations of non-consensual sex, the prosecutors had little concrete evidence.

So to persuade the jury, the lawyers turned to a controversial strategy that would ultimately lead to the conviction’s undoing. They put additional women with accounts of abuse by Mr. Weinstein — so-called Molineux witnesses — on the stand to establish a pattern of predation. The decision seemed apt for the moment: In a legal echo of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Weinstein was forced to face a chorus of testimony from multiple women.

The women’s testimony was searing, and when Mr. Weinstein was convicted in 2020, and then sentenced to 23 years in prison, it looked like the prosecutors had expanded the possibilities for holding sex offenders accountable.

“I did it for all of us,” Dawn Dunning , who served as a supporting witness in the trial, said in an interview afterward. “I did it for the women who couldn’t testify. I couldn’t not do it.”

But because New York law is open to interpretation on when those witnesses are allowed, the move risked violating a cardinal rule of criminal trials: Defendants must be judged on the acts they are being charged with.

That became the main basis for Mr. Weinstein’s repeated appeals of his conviction. For years, his lawyers have argued that his trial was fundamentally unfair, because it included witnesses who fell outside the scope of the charges. In addition to the alleged sexual assault victims, prosecutors brought in character witnesses who portrayed Mr. Weinstein as a capricious, cruel figure.

In 2022, a New York appeals court dismissed those concerns and upheld his conviction, after a vigorous debate by the judges. They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends,” but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.”

This February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s last-chance appeal, the proceedings did not garner much attention . But they felt quietly dramatic: Seven of the state’s highest judges, four of them women, were debating whether the man whose alleged offenses formed the cornerstone of the #MeToo movement had been treated fairly in court.

Today the court decided, with a majority that included three of those female judges, to throw out the conviction and order a new trial. Mr. Weinstein remains convicted in California and could be moved to prison there.

“We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” the judges wrote in their decision on Thursday.

“No person accused of illegality may be judged on proof of uncharged crimes that serve only to establish the accused’s propensity for criminal behavior,” the opinion continued.

But the decision landed by the slimmest of majorities: 4 to 3, with stinging dissents from judges who said they feared the implications of the court’s ruling. “The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability,” Judge Madeline Singas wrote, adding that witness rules had evolved to be more flexible. “By ignoring the legal and practical realities of proving a lack of consent, the majority has crafted a naive narrative.”

Reached by phone a few minutes after the court shared its decision, Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, was unwavering in her own judgment. “That is unfair to survivors,” she said of the ruling.

The heated back-and-forth from the New York judges, and the early reaction to the decision, launched fresh debate about whether the ground rules for sexual misconduct convictions need to be updated.

“The #MeToo movement showed how important it is to have accounts from multiple accusers,” Ms. Tuerkheimer said. But witness rules — which are strict for a reason — can leave courtrooms an “alternate universe in which evidence relevant to sex crimes is often kept from the jury.”

“There’s a tension at the heart of it,” she said, “and prosecution in the #MeToo era will continue to deal with this dilemma.”

Michael Wilson ,  Jonah E. Bromwich ,  Jan Ransom and Nicole Hong

New York Court of appeals overturns the Weinstein conviction.

New York’s highest court on Thursday overturned the felony sex crimes conviction of the notorious Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, a staggering reversal of a bedrock case in the #MeToo era that prompted countless victims of sexual harassment and assault to come forward as accusers.

In a bitterly contested 4-to-3 decision , the New York Court of Appeals found that the judge who had presided over Mr. Weinstein’s case deprived him of a fair trial in 2020 by allowing prosecutors to call witnesses who said Mr. Weinstein had assaulted them — but whose accusations were not the basis for any of the charges against him.

Responding on Thursday, the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, announced that he would seek to prosecute Mr. Weinstein again.

“We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault,” a spokeswoman for Mr. Bragg’s office said. The case was originally prosecuted by his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

For Mr. Weinstein, 72, the immediate impact of the ruling might amount to little more than a change of scenery. He is likely to be transferred from the prison in Rome, N.Y., where he has been held since 2020, to a facility nearer to New York City, where he will await the filing of new charges. But the opinion also raised questions about whether a separate conviction in California — on rape and sexual assault charges — can survive a similar legal challenge.

That case, which saw Mr. Weinstein sentenced to another 16 years in prison in 2022, also relied in part on witnesses whose accusations did not lead to charges. Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer in the California case said she planned to file an appeal next month.

A representative of the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said it was “saddened by the news out of New York.”

“Our office had representatives in New York during the trial, and we are aware of the extreme difficulties the victims faced while testifying about the traumas that Mr. Weinstein caused them,” the representative said, adding: “We are confident that our convictions will withstand appellate scrutiny.”

The decision to overturn the New York conviction, while shocking to many, had been anticipated in legal circles. The criminal case against Mr. Weinstein had been viewed as fragile since the day it was filed, and prosecutors were believed to have taken risky, boundary-pushing bets to see it through. Still, the ruling was met with expressions of shock and anger by some of Mr. Weinstein’s accusers.

Ashley Judd, the first actress to come forward with allegations against Mr. Weinstein, called it “unfair to survivors.”

“We still live in our truth,” Ms. Judd said on Thursday. “And we know what happened.”

Mr. Weinstein’s lawyer, Arthur Aidala, said his client learned of the decision when he was handed a news report on a slip of paper by someone in the prison facility.

“He said thank you more times than I can count,” said Mr. Aidala, who spoke to Mr. Weinstein by phone Thursday morning. “Harvey was very gracious, very grateful.”

The former producer’s health has been steadily declining in recent years. He has diabetes, eye problems and heart issues, has used a walker and was housed in a medical unit at the prison, the Mohawk Correctional Facility.

“He has been going through bouts of difficulty,” said a spokesman, Juda Engelmayer.

Mr. Weinstein had been a sharp-elbowed titan in the film industry, rising to power in the 1990s behind a stream of critically lauded, blockbuster movies under the Miramax label. His downfall after lurid accusations emerged from dozens of actresses and former colleagues became a primer for how the world viewed and treated many once-powerful men who used their positions for sex.

Mr. Weinstein was accused of sexual misconduct by more than 100 women . But in New York he was convicted of raping an aspiring actress, Jessica Mann, and assaulting a television production assistant, Miriam Haley, and sentenced to 23 years in prison. Thursday’s decision did not discount the credibility of the accusations against him. Rather, it found fault with the admission of the testimony of women whose descriptions of abuse fell outside the criminal case.

Prosecutors in sexual assault and other cases often seek to use them to establish a pattern of behavior. But doing so risks unfairly influencing the jury because the defendant is supposed to be judged only on the crimes he is charged with. For that reason, judges seek to limit such testimony, and the judge in Mr. Weinstein’s case, Justice James M. Burke, did not permit the prosecutors to call as many of those witnesses as they had hoped to. But he did allow a handful to testify.

The appeals court said that he should not have.

“It is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character,” Judge Jenny Rivera wrote on behalf of the majority, “but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges.”

Donna Rotunno, Mr. Weinstein’s lead trial lawyer in New York, praised the ruling on Thursday.

“They were prosecuting him for sins, not crimes,” she said. “This speaks to our justice system as a whole. The court ruling says to prosecutors: Winning at all costs is not your job. Your job is to put on a fair trial.”

The Court of Appeals also faulted the trial judge for permitting prosecutors to question the producer about uncharged allegations — spanning back decades — if he decided to take the stand. He did not testify.

Dawn Dunning , one of the women who prosecutors called to the stand even though Mr. Weinstein had not been charged with assaulting her, said on Thursday that she had no regrets.

“I am still proud that I testified and confronted that convicted rapist,” Ms. Dunning said in a statement, adding: “I am a stronger person for having done so, and I know that other women found strength and courage because I and other Weinstein survivors confronted him publicly.”

“The culture has changed,” she added, “and I am confident that there is no going back.”

In 2022, after a vigorous debate by the justices, a lower appeals court upheld Mr. Weinstein’s conviction . They wrote that the testimony from the additional witnesses had been instrumental in showing that the producer did not see his victims as “romantic partners or friends,” but that “his goal at all times was to position the women in such a way that he could have sex with them, and that whether the women consented or not was irrelevant to him.”

In a quietly dramatic twist, this February, when New York’s highest court heard the producer’s latest and final appeal, four of the seven judges were women, and Thursday’s majority ruling included three female judges.

Their decision landed with stinging dissents. “Fundamental misunderstandings of sexual violence perpetrated by men known to, and with significant power over, the women they victimize are on full display in the majority’s opinion,” Judge Madeline Singas wrote.

The decision to overturn promised to launch fresh debate about the ground rules for criminal convictions in sexual misconduct cases.

“The #MeToo movement showed how important it is to have accounts from multiple accusers,” said Deborah Tuerkheimer, a former Manhattan prosecutor who is now a professor at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. But witness rules — which are strict for a reason — can transform courtrooms into an “alternate universe in which evidence relevant to sex crimes is often kept from the jury.”

Jodi Kantor , Hurubie Meko , Maria Cramer , Nate Schweber , Maia Coleman and Katherine Rosman contributed reporting.

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‘She was trying to find herself’: the untold story of Peggy Guggenheim, Hampshire homemaker

The socialite and collector prioritised art over family and claimed she had 1,000 lovers. But a new UK exhibition tells another tale – that of the five years she spent in Hampshire and Sussex leading a relatively ordinary life, as her granddaughter explains

B eside the Grand Canal, on a wall of the palazzo she called home for 30 years, a portrait of Peggy Guggenheim fizzes with her larger-than-life personality, a personality that once reverberated between these walls, and across Venice. In the painting, Peggy wears a pair of her signature outsize sunglasses, and clutches three of her beloved Lhasa Apsos terriers. Today, Peggy’s palazzo is a museum housing the art collection she amassed from the 1930s to the 1970s, featuring work by everyone from Picasso to Pollock, Ernst to Kandinsky, Duchamp to Tanguy, all of whom she knew and many of whom she slept with. The portrait hangs outside the office of the museum’s director, who happens also to be Peggy’s fiercest critic. She is Karole Vail, daughter of Peggy’s son, Sindbad.

Vail has been director of the Venice Guggenheim (there are related Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao) since 2017, and it’s fair to say that her take on her grandmother is mired in the belief that, while Peggy was a superlative art collector, she left much to be desired as a mother and grandmother. “She was obsessed with the men in her life: she never focused on her children in the way they needed,” says Vail.

Lovers, and art, came first with Peggy Guggenheim: but just as Vail has reaped the benefits of her grandmother’s passions in her professional life, she has mourned her neglect of her family in her personal life. And yet there was a moment, Vail concedes, when Peggy really did try to give family her best shot. That episode took place far from the glamorous Venice with which she is most associated, and a long way from the New York where she was raised. It happened in a leafy corner of Hampshire, and this summer, Petersfield Museum will play host to an exhibition focusing on this little-known period in Peggy’s biography, with works by Ernst, Tanguy and Henry Moore lent by the Venice Guggenheim.

In 1934, Peggy’s life – which had already been punctuated by dramas and tragedies, including her father Benjamin’s death on the Titanic, the death of her sister Benita in childbirth, and the loss of her other sister Hazel’s two young sons who fell from the top of a New York skyscraper in 1928 – was again in meltdown. She had been living in Devon; her marriage to Laurence Vail, father of her two children, had ended acrimoniously – and her next love affair, with literary critic John Holms, had ended suddenly with his death during what should have been a routine operation, when he failed to come round from the anaesthetic. However, Peggy was never without a lover for long, and she soon began a new relationship with the communist writer Douglas Garman. In her autobiography, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict , she relates almost as an aside that she had decided to end her life, so when the couple decided to buy a place to live in Hurst, just over the Sussex-Hampshire border near Petersfield: “I put the house in Garman’s name as I intended to die.” But in the next sentence the story changes abruptly: “Of course I didn’t [die] and I went to live in the house instead.”

Her new home was called Yew Tree Cottage, though Peggy describes it as having four bedrooms and two sitting rooms, one with a fireplace so big you could sit in it. By her standards, though, it was “small”: the big appeal was the grounds, which ran to an acre, with a stream running through. The reason for moving to Hurst was that her daughter, Pegeen, two years younger than Sindbad, wanted to attend the same school as Garman’s daughter, and Hurst was on the right bus route.

At first, it was just Peggy and Pegeen – and a maid, of course – at Yew Tree Cottage. After the divorce from Laurence Vail, Sindbad had gone to live with his father and his new wife; this separation of the siblings was one of many decisions that Karole Vail believes made life extremely difficult for her father and her aunt. But then Garman and his daughter, Debbie, moved in with Peggy; and it was at this point that Peggy seems to have discovered an unlikely new side to herself. In her autobiography she describes how she was, once again, the mother of two children; and this time, she seems to have enjoyed it more. She threw herself, against all odds, into domesticity.

Though Vail is not inclined to praise of any kind when it comes to her grandmother, she does concede that the five years Peggy spent in Hampshire show her in a different light. She was, Vail believes, “trying to find herself – she was figuring herself out, trying to understand herself better. She was trying to be domestic; she had been raised by nannies and governesses. Maybe she wanted to be a hands-on mother, and just didn’t know how.” In her autobiography, Peggy describes herself in these years as being so domestic she did little more than look after Pegeen and Debbie: she describes a simple, home-based life in which she read to the children before bedtime, watched them act out little plays in outfits from the dressing-up box, and cared for them when they were sick. For Peggy, it was almost certainly the nearest she ever got, in a life that would stretch across nine decades, to something like a “normal” existence.

It didn’t last. Peggy and Garman were, as she recorded in her diary, “fighting all day, f… all night”. She went to Paris, to stay in the Hotel Crillon; and it was in Paris at the end of 1937 that she met her next lover, Samuel Beckett, who “spoke very seldom and never said anything stupid”. He came to stay one weekend at Yew Tree Cottage. Up to this point Peggy had preferred paintings by old masters; Beckett told her “one had to accept the art of our day as if it was a living thing”. With this, her life’s work was set: “She went on to devote her life to something very different [from her family],” says Vail. “And that was art.”

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Peggy became one of the most important figures in the 20th-century art world, a renowned collector who managed to snap up hundreds of works by big-name artists on the eve of the second world war. In 1938 she opened what would be a landmark London gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, and the Petersfield exhibition will explore how she began to plan that from Yew Tree Cottage. She would go on to found a gallery in New York, where her proteges included Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, before moving to live in Venice, where she bought her palazzo and filled it with paintings, collages and sculptures.

And yet for Vail, born in 1958 and raised in Paris, her famous grandmother was rarely mentioned. “My father hardly ever talked about Peggy. There had been so many difficulties, and their relationship was fraught – he and Pegeen had suffered badly with the divorce.” Her father wanted to shield her from the fallout of a high-profile grandmother whose life was often seen as outrageous – Peggy said she had more than 1,000 lovers in her time, and was more than forthcoming about her sex life in her autobiography, and in general conversation.

Vail agrees that there’s value in a woman, especially in Peggy’s era, being so candid and straightforward about things that were often hardly mentioned. But that didn’t make her a good grandmother, she says. “We would come to stay in Venice, here in the palazzo, sporadically for holidays,” she recalls, “but it was never very child-friendly.” Later, in her teenage years, Vail spent some time there without her parents. “I don’t have particularly fond memories of Peggy from that time. She was a bit overwhelming and she would ask very direct and embarrassing questions – it was terrible for a young teenager, to have your grandmother asking about your sexuality and your boyfriends, often with other people listening.”

After school, Vail studied at Durham University, then lived in Florence for 12 years, where she worked in publishing. “But I couldn’t ignore my grandmother for ever,” she says. For the centenary of Peggy’s birth, in 1998, she pitched a show to the New York Guggenheim, and then got a job there, working her way up from being a curatorial assistant. In 2017, when the directorship of Guggenheim Venice became vacant, “the opportunity felt too good to be true”. Married to the abstract painter Andrew Huston – who pops into her office briefly during our chat to collect the couple’s Irish terrier, Briccolo, who’s been sitting quietly beside the desk – Vail says she has always needed to earn her living, and had long been a fan of the collection her grandmother amassed. She doesn’t dodge the difficult issues. “There’s always the question of nepotism [but] I always worked hard and that was recognised. There were many candidates for the job and I was deemed the right person to do it.”

The grandmother she spent so long trying to avoid is, of course, ever present: but these days, Vail says, she often forgets Peggy is a relative at all. She doesn’t feel she has much in common with her: she admires her sense of style, she says, but it’s very different from her own way of dressing (when we meet, she’s in smart slacks and a pullover – far from the ostentatious, brightly coloured outfits Peggy was photographed wearing). “I feel I’ve connected with the best of her,” she says. “ I care very much about the collection, and I hope she’d be pleased and happy that one of her grandchildren is looking after it for her.”

Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo opens at Petersfield Museum and Art Gallery, Hampshire, on 15 June

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• The Observer

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Harvey Weinstein rape conviction overturned by N.Y. court; California conviction stays

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In a dramatic reversal of the nation’s landmark #MeToo trial, a New York appeals court on Thursday overturned the sex assault conviction of disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.

The state appeals court found, in a 4-3 decision , that the judge who presided over Weinstein’s 2020 trial prejudiced his case by allowing four women who said Weinstein had assaulted them to serve as witnesses even though their allegations were not a part of the case.

The trial judge also made a mistake, the court ruled, in ruling prosecutors could cross-examine Weinstein about uncharged and decades-old allegations if he decided to testify.

“It is an abuse of judicial discretion to permit untested allegations of nothing more than bad behavior that destroys a defendant’s character but sheds no light on their credibility as related to the criminal charges lodged against them,” Judge Jenny Rivera wrote for the majority.

The predominantly female panel of judges ordered a new trial, arguing that the “synergistic effect of these errors was not harmless.”

“The only evidence against defendant was the complainants’ testimony, and the result of the court’s rulings, on the one hand, was to bolster their credibility and diminish defendant’s character before the jury,” the court added.

Women who accused Weinstein in the past moved swiftly to condemn the decision.

Actress Ashley Judd called the decision “an act of institutional betrayal.” Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the filmmaker and wife of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said it was “a very sad day for countless women who suffered at the hands of a serial predator.”

Gov. Newsom also weighed in.

“Harvey Weinstein is a stone-cold predator, a rapist, twice convicted. Not once. Twice,” Newsom said Thursday morning during a news conference outside Sacramento.

“Those that seek to somehow exonerate or explain away Harvey Weinstein’s behavior should also be ashamed of themselves,” he added. “He should never see the light of day. Period. Full stop.”

When Weinstein was first convicted in New York, the verdict was celebrated as a landmark win in the sweeping #MeToo movement that sought to hold men accountable for their sexual harassment and abuse of women.

Weinstein, alongside his brother Bob, created a show business empire through their entertainment company Miramax, revolutionizing the movie industry as they marketed independent films such as “sex, lies and videotape,” “Pulp Fiction” and the Oscar-winning “Shakespeare in Love” into box-office hits.

Along the way, there were whispers throughout the entertainment industry that Weinstein was a sexual predator. The allegations finally became public in October 2017, when accounts of sexual abuse from women who dealt with Weinstein over the years emerged after investigations by the New York Times and the New Yorker.

The mogul denied the claims. But the accusations continued to multiply and dozens of women came forward.

Outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse Thursday, Weinstein’s legal team celebrated the ruling.

“From the bottom of our hearts, from our collective hundreds of years of experience, we knew that Harvey Weinstein did not get a fair trial,” his lead attorney, Arthur Aidala, said. “There are some people who are unpopular in society, but we still have to apply the law fairly.”

The ruling undermined the will of the jurors in the case, Judge Madeline Singas wrote for the court’s dissenting opinion.

“This Court has continued a disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence,” Singas wrote.

Singas argued that the court whitewashed facts to conform to a he-said/she-said narrative, ignored evidence of Weinstein’s manipulation and premeditation and failed to recognize the jury was entitled to consider the defendant’s alleged previous assaults.

Weinstein is also convicted of rape in California , so the New York ruling will have no practical effect on his imprisonment.

Gloria Allred, the attorney who represented the prosecution’s key witness in the New York case, Mimi Haley, said the court’s decision was a “significant step backwards for the ‘Me Too’ movement.”

“Although victims have lost this battle, they have not lost the war,” Allred said, adding that Haley would consider testifying in another trial. ”

Emily Tuttle, deputy director of communications and senior advisor for the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said it would “do everything in our power to retry this case.”

Courts routinely admit evidence of other uncharged acts where they assist juries in understanding issues concerning the intent, modus operandi or scheme of the defendant, said Douglas H. Wigdor, an attorney who has represented eight Weinstein accusers, including two witnesses in his New York criminal trial. .

“The jury was instructed on the relevance of this testimony,” Wigdor said. “Overturning the verdict is tragic in that it will require the victims to endure yet another trial.”

Courts in California have long allowed the use of witnesses who offer allegations of prior bad acts.

“Prior bad acts evidence can be controversial, and the slim majority of appellate judges [in this case] ruled that the testimony of the other victims was prejudicial because their conduct was not charged,” said Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor who is president of West Coast Trial Lawyers.

“Jurors may not believe the testimony of one victim, but it’s hard for them to reject the testimony of multiple victims who tell the same story,” Rahmani added.

The Miramax co-founder has been serving a 23-year sentence since he was convicted in 2020 of rape and a felony sex crime after allegedly assaulting former production assistant Haley and once-aspiring actress Jessica Mann.

Weinstein, who has denied all wrongdoing, appealed in 2021, citing a series of issues, including errors at trial.

In their 160-page appeal, Weinstein’s legal team attacked the credibility of the six women who testified at his 2020 trial in lower Manhattan and questioned why some of them stayed in contact with the mogul, and even continued having sex with him, after the alleged crimes. Most of the women’s allegations were corroborated on the stand by others who were told about the assaults around the time they were alleged to have occurred.

In late 2022, a Los Angeles jury also convicted Weinstein of one count of sexual assault in connection with a 2013 attack on a woman inside a Beverly Hills hotel. Weinstein had been charged with sexual assault or misconduct against five women in that case, including Siebel Newsom, but jurors deadlocked or acquitted on the rest of the charges.

He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for that conviction, with the time to be served concurrently with his New York sentence.

Weinstein has also appealed the Los Angeles conviction, again taking aim at the use of testimony from so-called prior bad acts witnesses, who accused him of sexual misconduct that had not been criminally charged in Los Angeles.

LA Dist Atty. George Gascón told The Times he felt “very comfortable” the California conviction would stand.

“Our case against Mr. Weinstein is very solid,” Gascón said. “We didn’t use the evidence New York did. The California law is strong when comes to this kind of evidence.”

David Ring, an attorney representing Jane Doe 1 in Weinstein’s Los Angeles criminal case, said he was disappointed in Thursday’s ruling but confident Weinstein’s Los Angeles conviction would be upheld.

“As the only victim who has now obtained a criminal conviction against Weinstein, she will continue to stand tall and do whatever necessary to obtain justice not only for herself but for all victims,” Ring said.

One of Weinstein’s defense attorneys in his Los Angeles case, Mark Werksman, celebrated the New York ruling as “a great outcome and the right result.”

“We faced the same fundamental unfairness in the Los Angeles case, where the judge let the jury hear about four uncharged allegations of sexual assault,” Werksman said. “Harvey was subjected to a fire hose of uncharged and incredible allegations, which destroyed his right to a fair trial on the charges in the indictment. The case here should be reversed for the same reasons the New York case was reversed.”

California law, however, allows accusers to testify as witnesses even if their own cases never resulted in charges.

The testimony is admissible due to a change in California evidence law in 1996 that allows witnesses to demonstrate an alleged pattern of behavior or propensity to commit a crime, said Dmitry Gorin, a former L.A. sex-crimes prosecutor. Before the change, California’s law was extremely narrow like New York’s, he said.

Now, prosecutors’ use of prior bad acts testimony in California is so prevalent that police will still investigate sexual assault allegations that cannot be prosecuted due to the statute of limitations because they can still be used as evidence if an allegation that can be prosecuted is ever made.

“Very, very few prior bad acts appeals succeed in California,” Gorin said. “The law on admitting prior sexual assault evidence in California is very broad, and the judge’s decision to let that evidence in can be challenged as an abuse of discretion.”

While New York and California have different rules governing testimony in sexual assault cases, where often victims don’t come forward until long after the statute of limitations has run out, some legal experts say New York’s rules provide a needed layer of protection for defendants.

“You could think of New York as a dinosaur, but I think of it as New York being very vigilant of protecting the civil rights of defendants,” said Daniel Medwed, a professor of law and criminal justice at Northeastern University who is a former criminal appellate attorney in New York.

“It’s a traditional view, maybe it’s a lingering civil libertarian view that the jury punishes someone not for who they are alleged to be, but what they’ve done in this case,” Medwed added. “Loosening the rules of evidence could be a slippery slope to an erosion of all our rights.”

Times staff writers James Queally and Christi Carras contributed to this report.

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White House Plumber G. Gordon Liddy’s Wild Career After the Watergate Scandal

The former Richard Nixon aide, who’s portrayed in the new HBO limited series White House Plumbers , became a public speaker, actor, and radio host after his time in prison.

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G. Gordon Liddy served 52 months in prison for his role in organizing the break-ins at the center of the Watergate scandal in May and June 1972. But instead of dooming the former FBI agent turned political operative to obscurity, the misconduct only seemed to boost Liddy’s star power in the decades that followed.

Surprisingly, upon his release from prison in 1977, Liddy embarked on a long and successful career as an author, public speaker, radio personality, and television actor up until his death on March 30, 2021. The spotlight seemed fitting for the eccentric and controversial Liddy, who claimed he once ate a rat and could feel an “electric surge” through his body while listening to broadcasts of Adolf Hitler .

Here’s what happened to G. Gordon Liddy post-Watergate scandal, including some of his wild endeavors.

After Prison, Liddy’s Life as an Author

According to The Washington Post , Liddy was sentenced in March 1973 to 20 years in federal prison for conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wire-tapping related to Watergate. President Jimmy Carter commuted Liddy’s sentence to only eight years in April 1977, making him eligible for parole. He was freed soon after on September 7.

Liddy, who was born in Brooklyn on November 30, 1930, and grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey, exhibited quirkiness from a young age and wasn’t shy about showing it off. In a 1980 interview with NPR , he shared the story of how he overcame his childhood fear of rats by roasting and eating one his sister’s cat had killed.

According to the Los Angeles Times , he also claimed he put himself through tests to strengthen his will, like jumping out of the way of oncoming trains at the last minute and climbing a tree during an electrical storm to see if he would be struck.

He shared these and other candid anecdotes in one of his first major projects out of prison, a 1980 autobiography titled Will that sold more than one million copies and was adapted into a 1982 made-for-TV movie starring Robert Conrad. According to his Washington Post obituary, Liddy wrote that he enjoyed antagonizing wardens and incarcerated gang members while in prison. He even sang a Nazi anthem in response to racial epithets from Black prisoners. “I don’t believe there was a man there who understood one word of what I sang. But they got the message,” Liddy said.

Liddy also published two novels, the 1979 espionage thriller Out of Control and 1990’s The Monkey Handlers , as well as the nonfiction political commentaries When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country in 2003 and Fight Back: Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style in 2006.

Public Speaking Debates with Timothy Leary

Liddy visited colleges for public speaking engagements throughout the 1980s and participated in staged political debates with Timothy Leary , the psychologist and professor who famously advocated for the use of psychedelic drugs like LSD.

The two first crossed paths in 1966, when Liddy orchestrated a drug raid as an assistant district attorney in Poughkeepsie, New York, that led to Leary’s arrest. Leary, who Nixon had dubbed the “most dangerous man in America,” was later arrested again on marijuana possession charges and imprisoned in the 1970s.

The debates, which featured creative taglines such as “Nice Scary Guy Versus Scary Nice Guy” and “The State of the Mind Versus The Mind of the State,” pitted conservative Liddy against his progressive foil Leary in discussions about national security and civil liberties.

“He’s Darth Vader to my Luke Skywalker,” Leary once said of Liddy, according to The Washington Post . Their debates were featured in the 1983 documentary film Return Engagement .

Liddy’s Radio Show

Liddy’s most notable—and controversial—venture was his radio talk show The G. Gordon Liddy Show , which was carried by more than 270 stations across the country and reached an estimated 10 million listeners, according to The Washington Post .

Started in 1992, the show featured the “G Man” alternating between daily news and radical outbursts. Liddy often insulted President Bill Clinton , calling him the “coward-in-chief,” and bragged to listeners he used photos of Bill and wife Hillary Clinton for target practice.

He also drew controversy by linking the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to the Oklahoma City bombing carried out by Timothy McVeigh in 1995. He partially blamed the attack on ATF’s raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, two years prior.

Liddy morbidly advised viewers to shoot ATF agents in the head, though he later claimed he meant only in self-defense. “You can die under their bullets, or you can shoot back and try to defend your wife and family,” he said . “If they’re wearing flak jackets, don’t shoot them there, shoot them in the head.”

Liddy’s show remained on the air until his retirement in July 27, 2012.

Liddy in Movies and TV

Actor John Diehl portrayed Liddy in the 1995 Oliver Stone film Nixon . But Liddy wasn’t afraid to be in front of the camera, either.

He had 20 acting credits according to IMDb and often played nefarious television characters, such as Captain William Maynard on Miami Vice in 1985 and 1986 and Carl Strickland in a 1988 episode of MacGyver . “I played only villains, and that way, as [my wife Frances] says, I don’t have to act. I just go there and play myself,” he told Playboy in 1995.

Liddy acted in 46 episodes of 18 Wheels of Justice from 2000 to 2001 and also had guest roles in the TV shows Airwolf , The Highwayman , and an adaptation of the Encyclopedia Brown book series.

But perhaps Liddy’s wildest TV appearance was his turn as a contestant on a celebrity edition of Fear Factor , the stunt-based NBC game show hosted by Joe Rogan in its first run from 2001 to 2006. Liddy, the show’s oldest-ever contestant at age 75, competed with seven other celebrities in an episode that aired September 12, 2006.

Liddy and former child actor Tempestt Bledsoe won the first stunt, which had them removing flags from a safety vest while being violently dunked in a pool of water. Then after Bledsoe quit, he lasted the longest inside an isolation pod that subjected contestants to high temperatures, bugs, and other surprises to win a pair of Metropolitan Chopper motorcycles.

Liddy’s last TV and film credit was in 2009. After his death in 2021 at age 90, his son Thomas revealed Liddy had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease a few years prior. He was survived by five children and 12 grandchildren.

How to Watch White House Plumbers

The first episode of White House Plumbers premieres Monday, May 1 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on HBO, with four additional episodes airing weekly on Monday nights. The series will also stream on HBO Max .

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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