A federal judge on Friday denied Ghislaine Maxwell’s request for a new trial.
“Judge Alison Nathan said in her ruling that Maxwell’s lawyers had failed to satisfy the requirements for granting a new trial in a criminal case.” NBC reported.
In December Ghislaine Maxwell was found guilty on of 5 of 6 counts.
Important details about the case were sealed by the judge.
Maxwell worked as Jeffrey Epstein’s pimp for years and the DOJ knew they were running girls as young as 12 but they refused to act.
Maxwell pleaded not guilty to charges stemming from her role as Epstein’s ‘madam’ from 1994 to 2004.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s attorneys in January asked for a new trial after new revelations of one of the juror’s public comments on child sex abuse.
A judge on Friday upheld Ghislaine Maxwell’s sex trafficking conviction.
NBC reported:
A federal judge Friday denied granting a new trial to British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, who had argued that her conviction for procuring underage girls to be sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein was tainted by the presence of a juror who failed to disclose he himself had been sexually abused as a child.
Judge Alison Nathan said Maxwell’s lawyers had failed to satisfy the requirements for granting a new trial in a criminal case.
Nathan wrote in her ruling that the juror had credibly testified during a hearing in March that he “skimmed way too fast” over a questionnaire before Maxwell’s trial last winter that asked prospective jurors if they had been the victims of sexual abuse.
Maxwell’s lawyers said that Juror 50′s failure to answer that with a yes, instead of the no, as he did, violated her right to have a fair trial.
But Nathan wrote that based on Juror 50′s testimony last month, she believed that “he was not biased and would not have been stricken for cause” from serving on the jury “even if he had answered each question on the questionnaire accurately.”
