"How do we in New York reconcile the decisions of law by members of our highest court that seem disconnected with the factual realities around rape and power differentials..."

"... that lead to sexual abuse in the workplace? After this Weinstein decision, how do we give faith to victims that the system can work to hold sexual abusers like Weinstein accountable?"

Asks Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in "What It Takes to Keep Harvey Weinstein, and Men Like Him, Behind Bars" (NYT)(free access link). Vance was the Manhattan D.A. who prosecuted Weinstein.

The dissenting judges, represented most forcefully by Judge Madeline Singas, a former elected district attorney from Nassau County, looked at the same facts as the majority and admissibility under Molineux, but they did so through a modern lens and understood the reality accepted by sexual assault experts that the majority refused to acknowledge. 

In the contemporary understanding of sexual assault cases involving “acquaintance rape,” it is often relevant and necessary to introduce testimony of other survivors who experienced the same behavior to rebut the defense that the sex was consensual — or, quoting from an earlier opinion by the Court of Appeals involving a Molineux analysis, a “repetition, duplication and similarity of defendant’s acts” that has “a direct bearing on the question of premeditated intent.” The defense at trial capitalized on what Judge Singas called “rape myths, and rape culture at large, asking the jury to believe that, despite their words and actions, the victims were consenting.”

The Court of Appeals decision does not change the law under Molineux. But in cases of sexual violence, going forward — absent legislation like California’s or that proposed now but not yet passed in New York — it will tend to prevent relevant and important evidence of uncharged criminal acts to be admitted in acquaintance rape cases. Such evidence could give the jury, with appropriate limiting instructions by the trial judge, a more fair, complete and balanced understanding of a defendant’s motive and intent....

Vance, asking for the New York state legislature to change the law and wanting to note the legislature's power to supervene the highest state court's decision, writes: "Statutory authority eats common law authority for lunch every day." That sentence jumps out, but it's stating something obvious, that everyone knows: Statutory law trumps common law. The ordinary locution uses a distracting word, trump, and impels the writer to that murderous metaphor.