- Lawyers for
Ghislaine Maxwell say that a juror who threw her verdict into doubt wanted "15 minutes of fame." - They said his interviews about his own sexual abuse revealed he was biased and shouldn't have been on the jury.
Lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell made a new bid to get her a new trial, arguing that a juror who sat on her child-sex-trafficking trial late last year lied to get on the jury and paraded his experience in the press.
"Far from hoping to remain anonymous, Juror 50 reveled in the attention and started posting his own messages on social media, using his actual picture and his real first name, announcing to the world that he was on the Maxwell jury," her attorneys wrote in a motion filed to court Tuesday night. "Juror 50 was not looking to avoid notice. He was looking to soak up his 15 minutes of fame."
Maxwell was found guilty in late December of trafficking girls to the now-dead pedophile
The juror, who identified himself in media interviews with his first and last name,
Maxwell's lawyers say the juror, also known as Juror #50, should have never been seated. Prosecutors have insisted there's no evidence he was purposefully deceitful or harbored bias.
In their own filing Tuesday night, prosecutors said the juror's testimony last week made it "crystal clear that the defendant received a fair trial" and "entirely appropriate" for him to sit on the jury.
"Juror 50's sworn testimony at the hearing made evident that he did not deliberately lie in completing the questionnaire, but that he instead made an honest mistake," prosecutors wrote. "And in any event, had Juror 50 accurately reported in his questionnaire that he had been a victim of sexual abuse, he would not have been struck for cause."
The juror "reveled in the attention" after the trial, per Maxwell's lawyers
In the hearing last week, Juror #50 said he went through the questionnaire quickly because he was bored and distracted during jury selection and never thought he'd be selected in the first place.
He also said he glossed over questions about whether he was sexually abused or the victim of a
"I really don't think about my sexual abuse, period," he said.
He also testified that listening to Maxwell's four victims be "brave" and talk openly about their experiences with abuse inspired him to disclose it himself. Maxwell's lawyers Bobbi C. Sternheim and Christian Everdell wrote that it proved he was an "advocate" for the victims.
"Juror 50's testimony shows that the victims' testimony personally resonated with him in a way that jurors who had not been sexually abused as children would not have felt," they wrote. "It caused him to regard himself as an advocate of the victims rather than a neutral arbiter of the facts."
Juror #50 also testified that he did not believe his media interviews would be widely read, saying that people close to him were hardly aware the Maxwell trial was taking place. For that reason, and because he didn't use his last name, he didn't think that friends and family would find out about his experience with sexual abuse, he said.
Maxwell's lawyers said the explanation was "tortured and thoroughly unbelievable" and that he "reveled in the attention" in social media posts and interviews.
"In the end, what was evident before the hearing is even more clear after the hearing – had Juror 50 given truthful answers on the questionnaire, his biases and sympathies would have been fully explored and he would have been challenged, and excluded, for cause," the lawyers wrote.
Prosecutors, however, told the judge that the juror's transparency showed he had "nothing to hide."
"At worst, Juror 50's expectations about the consequences of his interviews reflect naivety; they do not reflect deception," they wrote.