Ghislaine Maxwell's Lawyers Demand New Trial After Juror's Slipup

NEW YORK — A court has unsealed the motion filed by attorneys for Ghislaine Maxwell requesting a new trial more than two months after her conviction for sex trafficking, amid a juror's admission that he failed to disclose his own experience of sexual abuse as a child.

The 66-page motion was filed in January but unsealed on Friday, weeks after Maxwell's lawyers first told Judge Allison J. Nathan that they planned to make the demand. Maxwell, 60, was found guilty by a jury in December of helping introduce teenage girls to her companion, the financier Jeffrey Epstein, in order for Epstein to sexually abuse them.

Maxwell's demand centers on admissions by the Manhattan man identified as Juror No. 50. After the trial, the man told several news outlets that he had confided in his fellow jurors while they deliberated that he had been abused as a child — telling the Daily Mail that the "room went dead silent" upon his revelation.

After being summoned back to the courthouse in an unusual hearing this week, the juror insisted he had made a mistake by answering "no" to a pretrial screening question asking whether jurors had ever been abused. (He had "skimmed way too fast" through the questionnaire, he told the judge.)

“I didn’t lie in order to get on this jury,” the juror told Judge Nathan, according to multiple reports, adding that it was "one of the biggest mistakes I have ever made in my life."

Still, Maxwell's attorneys argue that his admission prejudiced the rest of the jury "to believe Ms. Maxwell’s accusers," depriving Maxwell of her constitutional right to a fair trial.

The U.S. government countered in its own 71-page response to Maxwell's motions, citing a 1984 Supreme Court opinion that a defendant "is entitled to a fair trial but not a perfect one, for there are no perfect trials."

To win a new trial, Maxwell's lawyers would need to prove that the juror deliberately lied in his questionnaire — a charge that he has denied.