Ghislaine Maxwell trial: Overturning sex abuse verdict won’t be easy, experts say
Global News
British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell is going to appeal her conviction for setting up teenage girls to have sexual encounters with financier Jeffrey Epstein.
British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell is going to appeal her conviction for setting up teenage girls to have sexual encounters with financier Jeffrey Epstein, but experts said she will struggle to clear the high legal bar needed to overturn the verdict.
U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan dealt several blows to the defense during the month-long trial that ended on Wednesday, including denying a request to have some witnesses testify anonymously and another to block lawyers for two of the accusers from taking the stand.
Legal experts said Maxwell’s lawyers are likely to cite such rulings in any appeal of her conviction on five of six counts, including sex trafficking, by a jury in federal court in Manhattan.
But to succeed, her lawyers would have to show that Nathan violated federal rules of evidence or abused her discretion.
“We have already started working on the appeal, and we are confident that she will be vindicated,” Maxwell’s lawyer Bobbi Sternheim told reporters on Wednesday, without going into specific legal grounds.
Even if an appellate court agreed that Nathan made a mistake, Maxwell’s lawyers would need to show that it mattered to the outcome of the case. A “harmless error” is not enough to overturn a conviction, according to Bennett Gershman, a professor at Pace Law School.
“It’s a very heavy burden,” Gershman said, adding that federal appellate courts tend to defer to trial judges.
An avenue of appeal for the defense might be to argue that the testimony of Kate, one of the accusers, was improperly admitted.
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