The judge in Ghislaine Maxwell’s child sex-trafficking trial has asked jurors to meet for an extra hour daily until a verdict is reached over fears of Covid-19 disrupting the trial.
Judge Alison Nathan asked the 12 jurors to say until 6pm, an hour later than previously, due to New York City’s ‘astronomical spike’ in coronavirus cases.
‘We are very simply at a different place regarding the pandemic than we were a week ago,’ the judge told the courtroom Tuesday morning.
‘There is a high and escalating risk that jurors and/or trial participants may need to quarantine,’ she said, according to the BBC.
The jurors were not required to have been vaccinated against Covid-19 when they were selected. They were also expecting to have Thursday and Friday off, but the judge said that would no longer be the case.
Defense attorney Laura Menninger told the judge that any suggestion the jury should stay later was ‘beginning to sound like urging them to hurry up’.
She pointed out that the jury was continuing to request transcripts of trial testimony and other materials that indicated they were working diligently.
The jury resumed deliberations this week after breaking for Christmas mid-last week. They have been deliberating Maxwell’s fate for at least 30 hours.
The jury must decide whether Maxwell helped recruit and groom teenage girls as young as 14 to be sexually assaulted by her once-boyfriend, financier Jeffrey Epstein between 1994 and 2004.
Maxwell has denied grooming grooming underage girls for Epstein. If convicted, she could face decades in prison.
Prosecutors say Maxwell, who turned 60 in a Manhattan jail cell on Saturday, played a pivotal role in normalizing the abuse, and sometimes even took part in it. Four women testified they were sexually abused as teenagers by Epstein with help from Maxwell, who was his girlfriend and work associate.
Maxwell’s attorneys say the memories of her accusers were corrupted by the passage of time, and that she’s being scapegoated after Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting his own sex-trafficking trial.
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