has lost her bid to overturn her sex trafficking conviction linked to helping the late sexually abuse young girls.
US District Judge Alison Nathan in a written 45-page ruling on Friday upheld the British socialite’s guilty verdict, setting the stage for her to be sentenced to prison for possibly decades.
Maxwell, 60, is slated to be sentenced in June after being convicted of helping recruit and girls for financier Epstein to abuse.
Nathan ruled that three of the guilty verdict counts were backed by witness testimony as well as evidence in the trial. But Nathan rejected two of the guilty verdict counts, reducing Maxwell’s maximum possible sentence by 10 to 55 years.
The judge said that three of the charges covered the same offense and upheld only one among those guilty verdicts.
‘This legal conclusion in no way calls into question the factual findings made by the jury,’ wrote Nathan.
‘Rather, it underscores that the jury unanimously found – three times over – that the Defendant is guilty of conspiring with Epstein to entice, transport, and traffic underage girls for sexual abuse.’
The jury in December 2021 found Maxwell guilty of five of the six charges she faced.
Shortly after Maxwell was convicted, one of the jurors, Scotty David, revealed that he was sexually abused as a child and said that he used the experience to inform the jury during their deliberations.
Maxwell’s lawyers sought a retrial, saying that potential jurors were asked if they were sexual abuse survivors in a questionnaire. The juror had replied no.
David in March apologized to the judge for not disclosing his past. Maxwell’s attorneys argued that they would have removed David from the panel had they known about his childhood experience. However, Nathan on April 1 decided that the juror acted fair and not biased against Maxwell, and rejected a retrial.
Maxwell’s request to overturn her conviction that was denied by Nathan on Friday was separate from the juror issue.
Epstein, a convicted sex offender, died by suicide in his jail cell in Manhattan while waiting his sex trafficking trial in 2019.
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