Evening Telegraph (First Edition)
Sex abuse claim by Maxwell juror
GHISLAINE Maxwell, convicted of conspiring to recruit and groom teenage girls to be abused by Jeffrey Epstein, intends to request a new trial after revelations by one of the jurors in her case that he was a victim of sexual abuse.
Defence lawyers Jeffrey Pagliuca and Laura Menninger said in a letter to US District Judge Alison J Nathan that “based on undisputed, publiclyavailable information, the court can and should order a new trial without any evidentiary hearing”.
“Ms Maxwell intends to request a new trial,” they wrote.
They added that if a hearing is required, it should happen soon and that all jurors who deliberated “need to be examined, not to impeach the verdict, but to evaluate the juror’s conduct”.
Attorney Christian Everdell said in his own letter to Judge Nathan that she should suspend all other post-trial motions in the case while learning more about the juror’s actions because the revelation “presents incontrovertible grounds for a new trial”.
In interviews published by The Independent and the Daily Mail, one juror described a moment during the deliberations when he told fellow jurors in Maxwell’s trial that, like some of the victims of the late financier Epstein, he had been sexually abused as a child.
And he said he convinced other jurors that a victim’s imperfect memory of sex abuse does not mean it did not happen.
In their own letter to Judge Nathan, even prosecutors said those reports “merit attention by the court”. The juror was identified only by his first and middle name in the articles.
They suggested that she schedule a hearing in about one month, along with a schedule for lawyers to file briefs regarding the applicable law and the scope of the hearing.