ESPN's broadcast of the Connecticut Sun's game against Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever had the highest viewership for a WNBA game on the network.
The Sun's 92-71 win over the Fever in Clark's WNBA debut on the league's opening night on Tuesday drew an average of 2.1 million viewers on ESPN2, ESPN+ and Disney+, including a high of 2.3 million viewers between 7:45 p.m. and 7:59 p.m. That topped ESPN's previous mark of nearly 1.5 million viewers for a Phoenix Mercury-Connecticut Sun game on May 22, 2004, in Diana Taurasi's rookie season.
The second game between Phoenix and the two-time defending champion Las Vegas Aces averaged 464,000 viewers, with the two games averaging 1.28 million — a 192% increase over the league's average last year for broadcasts on ESPN.
Clark set the NCAA all-time scoring record at Iowa last season and she was a big reason why a record 18.9 million viewers tuned in to the national championship game, which her Hawkeyes lost to unbeaten South Carolina. Clark's arrival to the WNBA has already been a big boost for the league. The WNBA draft had record viewership, and three teams have already moved their games to bigger arenas to keep up with the demand for tickets to watch her play.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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