The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York submitted a photo exhibit for the trial.
The child-sex-trafficking case against Ghislaine Maxwell is almost over.
The state rested its case on Thursday, but it went terribly for them.
The testimony of a star witness was delayed because a lawyer was sick.
One of the witnesses in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial was supposed to testify on Thursday.
The prosecution's case was expected to end with a bang because of Annie Farmer, one of the four accusers. Annie's story has been widely publicized, unlike the three accusers who have already testified.
In 1996, a then-16-year-old Farmer flew from her home in Arizona to Jeffrey Epstein's New Mexico ranch. Farmer has said in interviews that at the ranch, she was given a sexualized massage and told to take off her top.
According to Farmer, there were many instances of physical contact from Maxwell and Epstein that she found inappropriate. The Victoria's Secret mogul is not a party in the criminal trial of her former client, but her sister has leveled more serious allegations against him.
After presenting Farmer's testimony to the jury, prosecutors were expected to rest their case. They were going to call an FBI agent to testify about certain pieces of evidence in order to support their argument that some girls were sexually abused by them.
Annie Farmer didn't testify Thursday.
The trial was adjourned at 10:34 a.m. by US District Judge Alison Nathan.
The jury was told to go home early because one of the attorneys needed medical attention. When Nathan made the announcement, journalists noticed that the assistant US attorney leading the case was absent. Nathan told the people in the courtroom that the medical issue was not related to COVID.
The prosecution had a bad day. The two hours of argument and witness testimony that Nathan squeezed in before sending the jury home went poorly for the lawyers trying to put Maxwell behind bars.
There is no clear evidence that Maxwell sent lingerie to the accusers.
Tracy Chapell, a FedEx paralegal, was called by prosecutors before Farmer's anticipated testimony.
The girls were sold for sexual abuse. The defense has argued that the Justice Department went after her as a proxy for the man who killed himself while awaiting trial on similar charges.
Chapell seemed to prove the defense attorneys point, and it was odd that prosecutors presented her as a witness.
Prosecutors have repeatedly referred to FedEx records during the trial. Pomerantz told jurors last week that the records would show that Eisenstein gave a gift to a victim when she was 15. Carolyn, who went by her first name, testified on Tuesday that she remembers receiving Victoria's Secret lingerie in the mail when she lived in West Palm Beach, Florida. She said that the package was sent from New York, where she grew up. Shawn was hauled in as a witness on Wednesday. He talked about the FedEx packages.
The witness "Carolyn" answers a question from the prosecutor.
The attorneys noted that the man is dead. If prosecutors wanted to prove that Maxwell was involved in the sexual abuse of Carolyn through those packages, they failed to do so.
Chapell testified that she dug up hundreds of pages of FedEx invoices from storage boxes that were subpoenaed by prosecutors.
She said that packages were sent from New York to a person named "Carolyn" in West Palm Beach in late 2002 and that some of the pages were partially redacted. The Carolyn testified earlier this week that she was sexually abused by Epstein.
The records show that none of those packages were sent by Maxwell. The records show that all the packages were sent by Cecilia Steen, one of the financier's assistants who has been accused of sexual harassment.
Tracy Chapell, a Federal Express employee, was testifying in the sex abuse trial of Ghislaine Maxwell.
The prosecution was made worse by the fact that Christian Everdell, who helped bring down El Chapo, presented dozens more pages of FedEx records from the same time period.
The records show that on the same days that other employees sent packages to Carolyn, Maxwell sent FedEx packages from the same Madison Avenue office. According to the FedEx records, Maxwell sent packages to investment banker Ron Burkle, artificial intelligence scientist Danny Hillis, and her sister, who was in court Thursday morning and gave her a glance when her name was read aloud.
The West Palm Beach resident was not listed as a sender of any of the possible spellings.
The package that appeared to be sent to "Jane", the pseudonym for another accuser in the trial, was listed as the sender on the package by Everdell.
The jury will review around 50 more pages of FedEx records after Chapell's testimony. The records don't show that she sent any packages that would indicate she was involved in sexual abuse.
Prosecutors are going to close early.
If prosecutors continued to pile on evidence against him, the jury would be easy to ignore. They told Nathan that they would need around three weeks to present their case.
On Tuesday, prosecutors told Nathan that they were going to rest by Thursday or Friday, cutting their case in half.
The brother of "Jane" broke court rules by talking to her after she testified, so prosecutors didn't call him to the witness stand to corroborate her story.
A tight case is not a bad thing. It is easier for the jury to process the most relevant evidence if they focus on the charges in the indictment.
Prosecutors in the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell investigation.
There are still questions for the jury in the curtailing of their case.
Why not indict Sarah Kellen as a co-conspirator? A representative for Kellen couldn't be reached for comment, but she has denied wrongdoing in response to civil lawsuits against her.
Virginia Giuffre's name has come up several times in the trial, so what is going on with her? The jury doesn't know that Giuffre is involved in civil litigation against Maxwell that formed the basis for perjury charges against the socialite.
The prosecutors in the case were out of place on another legal issue. Before Chapell's testimony began, the judge was told about anticipated testimony from Michael Buscemi, an FBI agent. Buscemi was asked to show the jury the handwritten message pads found in the home of Carolyn's friend, Jeffrey Epstein.
Buscemi wasn't one of the agents who got the message pads from the home of the man. If prosecutors wanted to have a witness read through the messages, the proper procedure would be to have one of the household staffers testify.
Nathan was in agreement with the lawyers. She said that prosecutors would have to wait until the end of the trial to point out the details in the message pads.
The original article is on Insider.
