Andrew Couts
You’ve been asked to serve on the jury in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a United States president. What could possibly go wrong? The answer, of course, is everything.
A juror in former president Donald Trump’s ongoing criminal trial in New York was excused on Thursday after voicing fears that she could be identified based on biographical details that she had given in court. The dismissal of Juror 2 highlights the potential dangers of participating in one of the most politicized trials in US history, especially in an age of social media frenzies, a highly partisan electorate, and a glut of readily available personal information online.
Unlike jurors in federal cases, whose identities can be kept completely anonymous, New York law allows the personal information of jurors and potential jurors to be divulged in court. Juan Merchan, the judge overseeing Trump’s prosecution in Manhattan, last month ordered that jurors’ names and addresses would be withheld. But he could not prevent potential jurors from providing biographical details about themselves during the jury selection process, and many did. Those details were then widely reported in the press, potentially subjecting jurors and potential jurors to harassment, intimidation, and threats—possibly by Trump himself. Merchan has since blocked reporters from publishing potential jurors’ employment details.
The potential dangers of doxing for jurors became clear on the first day of proceedings on Monday. A liveblog update in the Washington Post about Trump’s trial mentioned the Manhattan neighborhood where a potential juror resided, his duration of residence, number of children, and employer. This update was widely shared on social media with warnings that this man may be doxed, meaning his identity could be publicly revealed against his will, based on this information alone.
“The amount of information a person proficient in OSINT could gather based on a few public details about jurors or potential jurors is quite alarming,” says Bob Diachenko, Cyber Intelligence Director at the data-breach research organization, Security Discovery, and an expert in open source intelligence research.
Diachenko states that with basic personal details about jurors and certain tools and databases, “an OSINT researcher could potentially discover a large amount of personal information by cross-referencing all of this together. That’s why it’s critical to consider the consequences of publicly disclosing jurors’ personal information and ensure measures are taken to preserve their privacy during criminal trials.”
Even without specialized OSINT training, uncovering details about a juror’s life can be fairly simple. To verify how sensitive the information published by the Post was, WIRED used a commonly used reporting tool to search for the man’s employer. As a result, we were able to find out his name, home address, phone number, email address, the identities of his children and spouse, voter registration information, and more. It took us roughly two minutes to gather this data. The Post later added a note to its liveblog stating that it has removed the man’s personal details.
The ready availability of those details illustrates the challenges in informing the public about a highly newsworthy criminal case without interfering in the justice process, says Kathleen Bartzen Culver, the James E. Burgess Chair in Journalism Ethics and director of the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Amit Katwala
Andy Greenberg
Caroline Haskins
Caroline Haskins
“Simply because a notable figure is on trial does not mean that a juror automatically surrenders any claim to privacy,” Bartzen Culver says. “People who have been drawn into a case that is exceptionally newsworthy are not aware that a simple statement that they make about where they work might identify them and open them up to scrutiny and possibly risk.”
The dangers to jurors or potential jurors has only increased since the first day of jury selection, which remains ongoing, in part due to the challenges of prosecuting a former US president and the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 US presidential election. Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records, a class E felony in New York state, for payments made ahead of the 2016 presidential election related to alleged affairs with two women, adult performer Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal. Trump has claimed his prosecution is a “communist show trial” and a “witch hunt” and has pleaded not guilty.
On Fox News, coverage of Trump’s trial has repeatedly focused on the potential political motivations of the jurors, bolstering the former president’s claims. Trump, in turn, has repeated the claims by the conservative news network’s hosts. In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump quoted Fox News commentator Jesse Watters claiming on air that potential jurors in Trump’s trial are “undercover liberal activists lying to the judge in order to get on the Trump jury.” This, despite a gag order that forbids Trump from “making or directing others to make public statements about any prospective juror or any juror in this criminal proceeding.”
Broader media coverage of the Trump trial jurors appears to often be the work of political reporters who are unfamiliar with the journalism ethics specific to covering a criminal trial, according to UW-Madison’s Bartzen Culver. “It’s like when political reporters covered Covid and science journalists lost their minds.” She emphasized that it’s vital for any journalist covering a criminal case—Trump’s or otherwise—to “consider our role within the justice system.”
“Unethical behavior by journalists can delay trials. It can result in overturned convictions and the people having to go back and do a retrial,” Bartzen Culver stated. “That all works against our system of justice.”
The New York case is one of four ongoing criminal proceedings against Trump. In Georgia, where he faces multiple felony charges for alleged attempts to interfere with the state’s electoral process in 2020, Trump supporters leaked the addresses of members of the grand jury, after their names were listed in the 98-page indictment against the former president, as required by state law. Georgia’s Fulton County Sheriff’s Office declared last August that it was investigating threats against the jury members. The incident underscores the continuous threats people can face from Trump’s supporters, both in the short term and for the rest of their lives, if they’re perceived as having acted against him.
The leaks were found by Advance Democracy Inc. (ADI), a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and investigations organization established by Daniel J. Jones, a former investigator for the FBI and the US Senate Intelligence Committee. So far, Jones tells WIRED, ADI has not discovered attempts to dox jurors in Trump’s New York trial. But it’s still early days.
“We have not yet found identifying information on the extremist forums we monitor,” Jones says. “Having said that, I share your concern that it is only a matter of time before this happens.”
