By Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Maxwell Book Schulte Book Books - Guardian - NY Mag
LITERARY SDNY, July 21 – Eight months after Ghislaine Maxwell got on her jury a man from the Carlyle Group who was later to leak to the legal then British press how he had swayed his fellow jurors in secret in 40 Foley Square, another jury was being picked.
It was not for R. Kelly himself - that had been in Brooklyn, with no electronics allowed even in the windowless EDNY press room that blogger Kurt Wheelock had used - but rather of Donnell Russell, who the SDNY prosecutors called his manager.
Online R. Kelly supporters, if they could be called that, pushed back at Kurt. They insisted that Con Russell was not Kelz' manager, not even an associate, and that what he had done was not in Rob's name.
Russell was accused of being the one who called in a gun threat to the yuppie clubhouse of the Neuehouse Madison Square, the night of the Surviving R. Kelly premiere.
The eighty prospective jurors were asked about the singer, and about the docu-series. At least 30 of them not only had seen or heard of it, but also said they could not be fair.
R. Kelly, it seemed, had higher name recognition than Ghislaine Maxwell. And higher than Jeffrey Epstein?
Dying as he did in the Metropolitan Correctional Center a block east on Pearl Street, there would never be an apples to apples comparison.
But Kurt found himself comparing Epstein, who like Maxwell had been celebrated in and purchased the United Nations in Turtle Bay, to R. Kelly who traveled in separate world, by tour bus from Chicago to Florida.
Both Turtle Bay and the Windy City had Trump Towers, of course. But how else were they similar, and how different? More on Patreon here.
In June and July 2022 former CIA hacker Joshua Schulte was put on trial in a nearly empty and partiallly sealed courtroom in lower Manhattan.
Alongside an extradition fight in the UK concerning Julian Assange of Wikileaks, to which Schulte was charged and now convicted of exfiltrating the CIA's cyber tools such as "Brutal Kangaroo," there was little media coverage of Schulte's trial.
Now there is a book.
The author was in the courtroom each day, even during the sealed witnesses as one of the two pool reporters provided for after his advocacy before Judges Paul A. Crotty and then Jesse M. Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
As the trial wound down, SDNY-admitted lawyer Matthew Russell Lee won an order unsealing portions of Schulte's civil case challenging his conditions of confinement including a prohibition against any communications with any media, imposed by former US Attorney General Jeff Session but continued by current AG Merrick Garland.
Material from that unsealing, the trial and even some more speculative and literary excursions featuring recurring characters Kurt Wheelock and Michael Randall Long, featured in the Ghislaine Maxwell book "Maximum Maxwell" as noted by New York Magazine, here, made its way at the speed of the Internet into the new book
"Brutal Kangaroo: WikiLeaks Verdict Against Josh Schulte, and Other Whistleblowers: Convicted of sending the CIA's Vault 7 cyber tools to Wikileaks, Schulte remains in jail under DOJ SAMs," by Matthew Russell Lee.
U.S. e-book here, UK here, Australia here; paperbook forthcoming here.
This review will leave it to other to find over-reaches and typos. For his reporting, Lee was banned from the United Nations in 2018 by SG Antonio Guterres, whose Media Accrediation chief Melissa Fleming has ignored appeals from a UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression and, pro bono, the law firm of Quinn Emanuel.
One might surmise that history leads to some of the book's (over?) identification with the defendant.
A full scope instantaneous view of and taking off from trials like US v. Joshua Schulte seems to be Inner City Press' project here.
And here it is.
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