There was an infamous line employed by the terminally insipid Nancy Grace, “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” It was her way of saying that evidence of wrongdoing wasn’t necessary when the smell was bad.  In the New York Times, gender columnist Jessica Bennett does Grace one better.

Until Thursday, it seemed that we had entered a new age of accountability, legal and social, not just for Mr. Weinstein but also for the abusers who’d come after him. Even as the #MeToo movement fell short in some ways, the Weinstein case felt like a cultural marker — an Arthur’s sword in the stone moment, in which something irreversible happened. The monster of #MeToo had been vanquished, and it changed something about the way we understood vulnerability and power.

And then, suddenly, it didn’t.

She’s actually got it backwards, though I can’t blame her for being legally ignorant. She’s not a lawyer, and she, like so many non-lawyers, believes that the law should be different for those they love and those they hate, incapable of grasping that the law addresses the evidence of whether a crime has been committed regardless of one’s feelings toward the defendant.

But in establishing the limits of these so-called prior bad act witnesses — an attempt by the prosecution in the case to show a pattern of coercion — the ruling did something else: It highlighted the striking gap between how we’ve come to believe women inside the courtroom and outside it.

In the “court of public opinion,” the one in which there are no rules of evidence, no burden of proof and certainly no appeal, bias runs amok. It may be nothing more than the right person accusing the wrong person, or the piling on as if bulking up the numbers was a substitute for evidence that a person did something.

Around 100 more women came forward with stories of sexual misconduct by Mr. Weinstein in the aftermath of that first article by Ms. Kantor and Ms. Twohey. The book and movie that followed were titled, aptly, “She Said” — a homage to that chorus of voices.

And yet inside the courtroom, as I reluctantly learned this week, the opposite can be true: She said, she said, she said, she said can unravel a prosecution.

How could Weinstein not be guilty if 100 women came forward? The argument is plain: Are they all lying? Obviously, it’s conclusive proof that Weinstein is a bad dude, a sexual predator, a rapist. After all, if he wasn’t, would 100 women say so?

And, indeed, she may be right that Weinstein is as bad a dude as the women say. Or perhaps others just piled on to be part of the group, or some weren’t victims then but wanted to be victims later when it was cool to be a victim. Maybe 100 women were lying. Maybe 100 women were telling the truth. We don’t know, because Harvey Weinstein wasn’t charged with crimes against 100 women, but just two. The only questions at trial were whether he committed crimes against these two women, not 100 others whose accusations floated in the ether to convict him in the minds of people like Bennett that he’s a bad dude, so he must be guilty.

Put bluntly: Our court system has not fully caught up to culture when it comes to understanding sexual violence. On its face, the veritable tsunami of damning evidence against Mr. Weinstein and others exposed for wrongdoing seemed to solve a problem that activists had labored over for decades: How do you combat the “he said, she said” nature of sexual assault cases?

Put bluntly: Our court system operates on some fundamental principles, that the burden of proof is on the prosecution; that proof must be beyond a reasonable doubt; that the jury’s finding of guilt be based on reliable evidence that he committed the crimes charged, not that he’s a generally bad dude who deserves to be convicted, if not for the crime charged, then for his prior bad acts. Just as importantly, no matter how many people come forward to accuse a defendant of having a propensity to be bad, that does not prove anything about whether he committed the specific crimes charged. It smears the defendant. It makes the jury want to convict him. It does not prove guilt.

Advocates for the conviction of bad men see these tenets as getting in the way of their view of justice, but only for men accused of sex crimes against women.

Ms. Tuerkheimer noted that the closeness of the appeal’s ruling, as well as the back-and-forth from the judges, could (and perhaps should) revive debate about whether the rules for such convictions need to be updated. (In federal court, she said, there is a carve out for sexual assault that gives more leeway to prosecutors.) And yet, as it turns out, in some states — including California, where Mr. Weinstein’s lawyers plan to appeal next — they already have been.

Deborah Tuerkheimer, a law prof and former prosecutor, argues that the demands of evidence are too rigorous, and should be reduced to the level of public perceptions. If it feels guilty, that’s close enough for conviction. And she’s not alone.

Shortly after Mr. Weinstein was convicted in California in 2022, the former prosecutors Jane Manning and Tali Farhadian Weinstein argued in a guest essay for The Times that while trials should hold people accountable for bad acts, not bad reputations, the time had come to think about sex crimes differently. “Prosecutors should be able to argue something that tracks with common sense — that past predatory acts show a pattern of behavior,” they wrote.

In the “court of public opinion,” sex crimes are different, as the accused are guilty if people feel they are. The push is on to “carve out” sex crimes in courts of law, because evidence of actual guilt is hard while believing women is easy. And if there are 100 women, then the smoke is too thick to deny there’s a huge conflagration, and the defendant deserves to get burned.