Ghislaine Maxwell juror who is a survivor of sexual abuse says sharing his own story helped other jurors believe Maxwell's victims

• A juror in Ghislaine Maxwell's sex-trafficking trial says he was personally a victim of sexual abuse.
• He told The Independent that sharing his experience with other jurors helped them believe Maxwell's accusers.

A juror in Ghislaine Maxwell's child-sex-trafficking trial said he shared his own experience as a survivor of sexual abuse with other jurors.

Juror Scotty David told The Independent's Lucia Osborne-Crowley that the experience helped the other 11 jurors believe the four women who testified against Maxwell, leading them to return a guilty verdict against her.

"I know what happened when I was sexually abused. I remember the color of the carpet, the walls. Some of it can be replayed like a video," David, who identified himself using his first and middle name, told The Independent, adding: "But I can't remember all the details, there are some things that run together."

Maxwell was convicted last week of five of the six charges brought against her, for sex-trafficking girls with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and sexually abusing them herself.

Maxwell's attorneys had sought to discredit the four women who testified against her by pointing to some discrepancies in how they told their stories in earlier media interviews and lawsuits. The defense attorneys also brought Elizabeth Loftus, a decorated expert in memory psychology, to testify as an expert witness about how memories can be manipulated.

David said he wasn't surprised that some Maxwell accusers didn't remember some of the finer details of their abuse, which is a common phenomenon among sexual abuse victims. He also wasn't surprised that some of the women didn't disclose their experiences to other people until later in life.

"I didn't disclose my abuse until I was in high school," he told the Independent.

David added that the jury room went silent when he shared his story.

"This verdict shows that you can be found guilty no matter your status," he said.

Three of the women who testified against Maxwell were considered victims in the charges.

A fourth accuser was not considered a victim for charging purposes, possibly because she was of legal age in the United Kingdom at the time that she alleges Maxwell facilitated sex between her and Epstein. But the woman offered corroboration to the other accusers' stories. Her testimony helped demonstrate to jurors "the pattern of how those girls were groomed," according to David.

"The pattern is that Ghislaine talks to you like she is also a teenager. Then it moves into massage. She tries to make you comfortable, to see what they can get away with," David told the Independent. "What she did was wrong."

David told The Independent that the jurors ultimately acquitted Maxwell on the second count in the indictment, which alleged Maxwell "enticed" the woman who testified under the pseudonym "Jane" to travel across state lines for sex, because they didn't have enough supporting evidence for that particular allegation. The jurors did convict Maxwell on other counts based on Jane's experience.

"I personally was willing to find her guilty on count two," David said. "But we all decided in the end that there wasn't enough evidence."

"They were all believable," he added. "Nothing they said felt to me like a lie."