SDNY COURTHOUSE,
Jan 2 -- Kurt had
spent the month of December 2021 covering the
trial of Ghislaine Maxwell in Courtroom 318,
with the seats inside carefully doled out, to
Ghislaine's sisters and brother and Leah
Saffian, select victims and survivors and
journalists.
He'd gone to the overflow courtrooms on
the first, fifth and even ninth floor and
communed with people on the periphery of
journalism, many of them proudly, from Los
Angeles and Wisconsin and as far away as
Australia and even Egypt.
How different it had been in June 2021,
when Justin Rivera was tried for sex
trafficking in the same courtroom, 318. Kurt
had often been alone in the gallery, and even
then, was quickly admonished to not use his
smart phone, by a judge who'd previously told
him, You cannot tweet in my courtroom.
In the glassed in witness box where
Annie Farmer, Carolyn, Jane and Kate would
later testify and have it reported in real
time by Kurt, and hours later by the Daily
Mail and Australian, in June 2021 had been
Natalie Rodriguez, until then "Victim 3."
She spoke with enormous dignity and
sorry. "What did it mean," she was asked,
"that Justin called your his bottom B-word?"
"That's how pimps keep their
prostitutes," Natalie Rodriguez had said.
She had been beaten until her face was
bloody, in that case not by Justin but a rival
wanting information on Justin's role in a
shooting on Long Island that killed three
co-conspirators in a sports utility vehicle.
After that, Justin had sent Natalie
down to Florida. The prosecution fought and
won the right to keep that from the jury,
saying it might confuse them as to the
relationship between the two.
They said, He might have agreed
Natalie could stay longer in Florida simply
because, with her face still swollen, she was
useless to him as a prostitute.
The story the jury heard ended when
Natalie got pregnant, the sort of turning
point faced and described by Virginia Roberts
Guiffre, but different given how little
society cared about Rodriguez, and Rivera, and
this whole conspiracy.
The closing arguments were given on
Friday, June 11, 2021 and Kurt went back to
the press room and wrote them up.
He stopped back in Courtroom 318 at 5
pm, expecting to hear the judge tell the jury
not to talk with each other or anyone else
about the case over the weekend, as Judge
Nathan had told the Maxwell jury before she
took off for Washington for three days seeking
the Second Circuit Court of Appeals seat.
But instead, in mere hours, the jury
came back with a verdict. On Count 1,
conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, how do
you find?
The jury foreperson, an African
American man with dread locks, answered with a
single word: Guilty. Then, So say you all. The
Marshals took Rivera away, to the MCC from
which he'd since been transferred to the MDC
in Brooklyn, with but not with Ghislaine
Maxwell. More here.
Days after Maxwell's conviction,
Rivera's sentencing was pushed back from
January 2021, when Kurt had jotted down to
cover it, to March. He would still cover it.
How many more cases like this are
there? Kurt had wondered at the time. And now,
in the wake of the #MaximumMaxwell verdict, he
would try to find out. #MirroringMaxwell.
The underlying
case is US v. Maxwell,
20-cr-330 (Nathan).
***
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