Ghislaine Maxwell’s bid for a new trial has come up short.
Maxwell sought to have her December conviction on five counts related to sex trafficking thrown out after one of the jurors revealed after the trial that he had failed to disclose that he had been a victim of childhood sexual abuse during the jury selection process.
But U.S. Circuit Court Judge Alison Nathan, who presided over the trial, denied Maxwell’s request, finding that the juror’s failure to disclose his abuse was “highly unfortunate, but not deliberate. “ She added further that she believed that the juror, referred to as “Scotty David” in several media interviews he gave after the trial, “harbored no bias toward the defendant and could serve as a fair and impartial juror.”
Nathan, who was recently confirmed for a seat on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, required the juror to testify in March about why he had failed to indicate his past sexual abuse when filling out a detailed questionnaire prospective jurors were required to fill out under the penalty of perjury.
He was granted immunity and testified that he had skimmed the questions on the questionnaire and that failing to disclose his past abuse had been “one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made in my life.”
Maxwell’s sentencing is scheduled for June 28, 2022, and she faces the prospect of decades behind prison.
She was accused at trial of recruiting and grooming four girls under the age of 18 for the abuse of her ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, who has been accused of abusing scores of girls. Epstein died in federal custody in August 2019 in what has been ruled a suicide, one month after being charged by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York with sex crimes in connection with his alleged abuse. Maxwell was arrested nearly one year after Epstein’s arrest on a New Hampshire estate where she had been living under the radar.
For Epstein and Maxwell’s victims, Maxwell’s arrest gave them a sense of justice after Epstein had avoided harsh penalty more than a decade earlier, when he was first investigated for his abuse of girls at his Palm Beach mansion.
“My soul yearned for justice for years and today the jury gave me just that,” said Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of Maxwell and Epstein’s most prominent accusers, after Maxwell was convicted.
Epstein’s remarkably lenient plea deal was the subject of The Miami Herald’s 2018 Perversion of Justice series, and prosecutors in New York said that the reporting led them to give Epstein’s case a fresh look, which led to the charges against him in July 2019.
