(New York) The Briton Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted at the end of 2021 in New York of sex trafficking of minors on behalf of the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein, will not be retried in a new trial as she demanded, an American judge decided on Friday.
Posted at 6:05 p.m.
Updated at 6:26 p.m.
“The defendant’s proposal for a new trial is rejected”, decided the judge Alison Nathan of the Manhattan federal court, according to a court order made public by the American justice.
The 60-year-old former international jet-setter and his lawyers have been demanding a new trial since one of the Manhattan federal court jurors who found her guilty on December 29 revealed to British media that he had even been the victim of sexual violence as a child.
After the trial, this 35-year-old man, Scotty David, spoke to the press in January and admitted on March 8 in court in New York that he had forgotten to mention, in his answers to a questionnaire to be a juror at the trial, having been sexually abused as a child.
This thirty-year-old – called “juror 50” by justice – had then admitted a “fault”, not a lie.
But the defense of Mme Maxwell believed that the juror could be suspected of bias in having to rule on sexual crimes against underage girls.
For the Manhattan court, “Juror 50 testified credibly and sincerely during his post-trial hearing. It is unfortunate, but not deliberate, that he did not disclose his past sexual assaults during selection for trial,” Judge Nathan wrote in her order.
“The court finds that juror 50 had no bias against the defendant and could be a fair and impartial juror,” according to the court document.
The daughter of British media tycoon Robert Maxwell (died 1991) was found guilty on December 29 of five of the six charges against her, the most serious of which was sex trafficking of minors on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein.
The American financier, with powerful economic and political networks in the United States and abroad, was himself accused of raping young girls, but committed suicide in prison in August 2019, before his trial.
His companion and accomplice for 30 years, Ghislaine Maxwell – British, French and American – faces decades in prison and will be sentenced at a hearing on June 28.