Weinstein gave a weak smile as he arrived at the station house shortly at about 7:25am local time (9.25pm AEST) wearing a dark jacket over a blue sweater and white open-collared shirt and dark denim jeans.

He carried thick books under his right arm, including what appeared to be biographies of the Broadway musical duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, and Elia Kazan, the director of such classic Hollywood films as On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire.

Police officers escorted Weinstein inside a lower Manhattan police station as scores of journalists pushed up against barricades for pictures and video, while three helicopters hovered overhead. He is due to appear later in the morning for arraignment at a Manhattan courthouse where a judge is expected to release him on bail, according to media reports.

Weinstein's spokesman Juda Engelmayer and his lawyer Benjamin Brafman both declined to comment on Thursday.

The charges follow a months-long investigation that involved the Manhattan district attorney's office.

The victim in the rape case has not been identified, the Times reported, but Weinstein will be charged with first-degree and third-degree rape. The other case involves allegations by Lucia Evans, a former aspiring actress who told the New Yorker that Weinstein forced her to give him oral sex in 2004, the Times reported.

Evans confirmed to the New Yorker that she was pressing charges.

"At a certain point, you have to think about the greater good of humanity, of womankind," she told the magazine.

'I did not believe this day would come': McGowan

Evans told the New Yorker in a story published in October that Weinstein forced her to perform oral sex during a daytime meeting at his New York office in 2004, the summer before her senior year at Middlebury College.

"I said, over and over, 'I don't want to do this, stop, don't,"' she told the magazine. "I tried to get away, but maybe I didn't try hard enough. I didn't want to kick him or fight him."

More than 75 women have accused Weinstein of wrongdoing around the globe. Several actresses and models accused him of criminal sexual assaults, but many of the encounters happened too long ago for any prosecution.

Actress Rose McGowan, among the first to accuse Weinstein of sexual assault, said seeing images of him in handcuffs was surreal.

"I actually did not believe this day would come," she said on NBC's Megyn Kelly Today program. "This is a big strike into the heart of abuse of power."

McGowan said Weinstein raped her in 1997 in Utah, Sopranos actress Annabella Sciorra said he raped her in her New York apartment in 1992 and Norwegian actress Natassia Malthe said he attacked her in a London hotel room in 2008.

The statute of limitations for rape and certain other sex crimes in New York was eliminated in 2006, but not for attacks that happened prior to 2001.

New York City police detectives said in early November that they were investigating allegations by another accuser, Boardwalk Empire actress Paz de la Huerta, who told police in October that Weinstein raped her twice in 2010. She is not one of the victims in the case on Friday; hers was still pending, officials said.

Authorities in California and London also are investigating assault allegations. Britain has no statute of limits on rape cases; some of the allegations under investigation there date to the 1980s.

Reuters, AP