The overturning of Harvey Weinstein’s New York sex crimes conviction this week 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 University, in an interview. The issue of whether Weinstein’s trial was fair “is a really close question that could have gone either way”.