Ghislaine Maxwell: key juror has hired lawyer, trial judge says

A juror who sat at the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell last month and has now told reporters he was sexually abused as a child has retained a lawyer, the trial judge said on Thursday.

US district judge Alison Nathan asked them to formally do so by 19 January.

Spodek did not immediately return a request for comment.

The revelations by the juror in interviews published by two British publications this week threatened to upend the guilty verdicts returned against Maxwell just seven days ago on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges, among others.

Maxwell, the daughter of the late press baron Robert Maxwell, was found guilty of sex trafficking in her Manhattan federal court trial last Wednesday afternoon.

Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, was arrested in July 2020 and has been in custody ever since, despite repeated arguments from her lawyers that she was being mistreated behind bars in federal detention in Brooklyn, and would not try to flee if released on bail.

She was charged with involvement in the crimes of her ex-boyfriend and financier, the late Jeffrey Epstein, who was a convicted sex offender and killed himself in a New York jail in 2019 as he was awaiting trial on further sex abuse charges involving girls as young as 14.

The verdict against Maxwell was unanimous. She faces up to 65 years in prison, with the date of her sentencing yet to be announced.

Memories and how they relate to sexual abuse victims were a contentious point among attorneys during the trial as each side summoned a memory expert to testify.

In the end, the jurors concluded unanimously that Maxwell was guilty of recruiting teenage girls between 1994 and 2004 for Epstein to sexually abuse.

After she read the verdicts out in court, Nathan then asked jurors publicly whether they were unanimous and a microphone was passed from juror to juror, who all agreed that it was.

Jurors were told they were free to express themselves freely and the man in question gave media interviews.