Jury selection for Donald Trump’s hush money trial gave ordinary Americans a chance to offer their opinions on the former president’s nearly five decades in the public spotlight.
By David Nakamura and Josh Dawsey, The Washington PostFormer president Donald Trump arrives at Manhattan's Criminal Court with his legal team ahead of the start of jury selection in New York on Monday.
The jury selection process for Trump’s hush money trial created something akin to a national focus group - albeit with a New York accent - giving ordinary Americans a chance to offer their opinions and reflections on the former president’s nearly five decades in the public spotlight. “I have got opinions. I’m born and raised in New York and I’ve kind of spent my whole life knowing about Donald Trump,” said a retired university administrator who told the court she once ran into Trump and then-wife Marla Maples as they shopped for baby supplies. The woman said her cousin once lived in Trump Tower in Midtown.
A lifelong New Yorker who works in law enforcement said he had a fondness for Trump because “as a wannabe hockey player, I still thank him for fixing that Wollman Rink that nobody couldn’t fix.” Trump’s celebrity raises the stakes of jury selection for both the prosecution and defense, jury consultants said. In cases with well-known defendants, even jurors who claim they can be impartial sometimes have ingrained views that can be difficult to overcome.
Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, who consulted for O.J. Simpson’s defense team during his 1995 murder trial, said a majority of potential jurors in that case held positive views of the former football star, who died this month. Simpson was ultimately acquitted in the highly publicized trial.
On Thursday, one woman professed that she didn’t have “strong opinions” about Trump and could be fair. But she later conceded under sharp questioning that she her views were, in fact, pronounced. Another prospective juror had posted an artificial intelligence-generated deepfake video in which Trump appears to repeatedly call himself “dumb as f---.” The man insisted he could be fair, saying it was “just something that I reposted. What I think of the defendant outside of this room has nothing to do with the merits of the case.”Another juror was presented with old social media posts she wrote, one calling Trump a “racist, sexist and narcissist.
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