The former British socialite 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 has been demanding for three months. “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 dated this Friday and made public by the American justice.
For three months, Ghislaine Maxwell, 60, a former figure of the international jet-set, and her lawyers, clung to the very slim hope of a new trial for sex crimes. Since one of the jurors in Manhattan federal court who found her guilty on December 29 had revealed that he had himself been the victim of sexual violence in his childhood.
“Explosive revelations”
Just after the trial in January, this 35-year-old man, Scotty David, confides in the British media, before being summoned in March by the courts in New York: he then admits under oath that he forgot to mention, in his answers to a questionnaire to be sworn, having been sexually assaulted as a child. This 30-year-old – called “juror 50” by justice – admits a “fault”, not a lie. But in Ms Maxwell’s defence, the man is suspected of bias because, as a former young victim, he must speak out about sex crimes committed against minors.
On the contrary, Judge Nathan wrote in her order this Friday, “Juror 50 testified credibly and sincerely during his post-trial hearing”. Certainly, “it is unfortunate that he did not reveal the sexual assaults suffered in the past, but not deliberately”.
The Manhattan Federal Court “finds that juror 50 had no prejudice against the defendant and could be a fair and impartial juror”. This court decision was not necessarily expected this Friday, but Judge Nathan was urgently seized at midday by Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyer, Bobbi Sternheim, about the imminent broadcast of an “explosive” documentary.
The documentary series “Ghislaine – Partner in Crime”, shot during and after the trial, is to be broadcast these days on the Paramount + streaming platform (Paramount Global group, ex-ViacomCBS). Juror Scotty David is interviewed “in depth” and makes “explosive revelations”, according to the lawyer’s letter and a Paramount trailer. Ms. Maxwell’s defense therefore asked the Manhattan judge to “suspend any decision (on a possible new trial, editor’s note) before the court and legal counsel see the interview” in the documentary. Federal justice will have ignored and rejected Maxwell’s request for a new trial.
The sprawling Epstein affair
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 multimillionaire, 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, at the age of 66 years old.
His companion and accomplice for 30 years, Ghislaine Maxwell – British, French and American – then faces decades in prison and will be sentenced on June 28. Arrested in the northeastern United States in the summer of 2020, a year after Epstein’s death, she has since been incarcerated in New York. In this network’s enormous international sex crimes file, British Prince Andrew, friend of the Maxwell-Epstein couple, sealed an amicable agreement on February 15 – for 13 million dollars according to the Daily Telegraph – with the American Virginia Giuffre who accused him of having sexually assaulted her in 2001 when she was a minor. The British royal family has thus avoided a civil trial in New York as resounding as it is embarrassing.
Finally in France, the former modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, close to Epstein and who had been imprisoned since the end of 2020 in Paris for “rape of a minor”, was found dead in his cell on February 19.
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