He Said, They Said

And it was that argument, apparently, that won the day with the jury of 12.

There were nine blacks and three whites; six of the blacks were women, as were two of the whites. From the start, the racial composition didn’t bode well for the prosecution. “The jury was a catch-22, because black women tend not to be sympathetic to white women, but also tend to be really unsympathetic to white men; the dicey part of the jury was the black women,” says a city D.A. who didn’t participate in the prosecution but has knowledge of the case. The prosecutor “was lucky to get the three whites he did,” with the jury pool in Philadelphia so heavily African-American. “Philadelphia juries are notorious for being horrible in sex cases” for the prosecution, the D.A. says.

According to the African-American juror I interviewed — the first and only juror to have spoken publicly, who would come forward only on the condition of anonymity — all was amicable in the first moments of deliberation. Until, he said, it was time to pick a foreperson, a position one of the middle-aged white women desperately wanted. The majority of the jury instead wanted an outspoken African-American man, and the juror said the woman reacted bitterly: “She was going to make our job rough, hard.” The jury took an initial poll. It was 11 to one to acquit on all charges, according to the juror; the lone holdout was the would-be forewoman. She would dig her heels in for five days.

They began going through each woman’s story. Virtually all of them could not get beyond the women engaging Marsalis after the fact. The women, to the jurors, were “sour grapes”; they’d been led on by the investigators who contacted them, trolling for victims. “He was a playboy,” the juror said, co-opting Hexstall’s language. “Men sit there and just — hey, if you believe he’s an astronaut, that’s on you. We didn’t think he was guilty because he said he was an astronaut to a person. And, you know, the CIA stuff? I mean, come on, you never know who works for the CIA, so we didn’t believe that, either.”

As the jury worked its way through the stories, with everyone voting not guilty, the lone holdout would vote guilty. “She would go back into saying, ‘All the women were saying the same thing. They wouldn’t do this, they wouldn’t spend the whole night with a person, if they weren’t drugged,’ and she just thought like he really put something in their drinks. But we couldn’t try a person on something that they never presented to us.”