I got an uneasy feeling as soon as news reports on jury selection in Donald Trump’s Manhattan hush money trial began appearing. For obvious reasons, the court has opted to shield the identities of the jurors in this case to safeguard the integrity of the proceedings, yet coverage of the selection process routinely included ample personal details that could easily be personally identifying—including characterizing their social media posts, describing their current employment and work history, the neighborhoods they lived in, their hobbies and ethnicity, and so on.
Sure enough, one juror was almost immediately identified, at least within her own social circles, and promptly dismissed when she told the court this might impede her ability to be “impartial.” Apparently friends who suspected she was on the jury—and presumably had their own strong views about the merits of the indictment—had already begun sending her material related to the case. Yet it’s hard to imagine another pressing concern wasn’t also on her mind: If her identity was so readily discoverable, she would inevitably become a target for harassment or even violence by Trump’s rabid fanbase in the event of a conviction. That prospect would be apt to weigh on anyone’s impartiality.
Nor does this seem likely to be a one-off. As a little experiment, I spent about ten minutes on LinkedIn working with one of the surprisingly detailed descriptions reported in the press, and very quickly zeroed in on one profile that plausibly fit all the characteristics. I have no idea whether I successfully identified the actual juror—who, of course, may not even be on LinkedIn, or have made their profile private—and have no intention of probing further. But it took shockingly little time or effort to winnow a very large pool of employees down to a unique likely candidate based on just a few sparse details, looking at just a single public social platform. Whether or not I stumbled on the correct person in my very brief, low-effort search, it seems inevitable that a more intensive, coordinated search pooling data from more sources would succeed for at least some of these people, or at the very least yield a small pool of candidates that included the actual juror.
I’m confident enough of this to hazard a prediction: Of the currently seated jurors about whom personal details have been publicized, at least one more, and possibly several, will be publicly identified in the coming days and weeks.
Cognizant of the risk of identification, Justice Juan Merchan has already directed the press covering the trial to refrain from publishing specific details of jurors’ employment or physical appearance. But I’m not confident it will do much good, for several reasons.
First, study after study has demonstrated that it is surprisingly easy to uniquely identify individuals based on a very few scraps of seemingly innocuous, anonymous information. Moreover, it’s often difficult or impossible to know ex ante which particular data points will, in combination, be sufficient to deanonymize someone. Three or four details that, considered separately, could describe thousands or millions of people may nevertheless overlap in a single individual.
Second, press groups are likely to challenge any restraint on their ability to publish information that would be strict enough to prevent deanonymization by a determined attacker. The First Amendment, after all, has been held to protect the right to gather information about public proceedings, including access to information about jurors. While that can be overridden by a sufficiently compelling public interest, again, it will probably not be sufficient to bar only the publication of obviously identifying information like names, employers, or the verbatim text of social media posts.
Third, even in the unlikely event the court succeeded in imposing a successful blackout on information about jurors, that would only block identification by strangers. Even if the general public knows nothing about you, it is awfully difficult to conceal from all your acquaintances and co-workers that you are serving what will almost certainly be at least many weeks of jury duty. Given the blazing media spotlight trained on this case, speculation about such folks will be rife, and all it takes is a single tweet or Facebook post to turn local gossip into common knowledge.
So let’s at least provisionally accept that it’s going to be virtually impossible to keep the identities of all the jurors secret even for the duration of the trial, let alone guarantee they won’t come out afterwards. What are the implications of this fact for the process? In a word: Ugly.
At this stage of the game, it has become clear beyond any possible dispute that individuals who become public targets of scorn by Trump and his surrogates are routinely inundated by harassment and threats. Election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss are perhaps the most famous instance: They won a $146 million defamation verdict against ex–Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, who repeatedly slandered them with false accusations of being involved in non-existent election fraud. Freeman was forced to flee (and eventually sell) her home in fear after being bombarded with hostile messages, several of which alluded to lynching.
Participants in the justice system have already become targets as well. Judge Chanya Chutkan, overseeing the D.C. prosecution of Trump in connection with his efforts to overturn the election, has been a frequent target of Trump’s ire and received death threats. The grand jury that indicted Trump in Fulton County, Georgia, saw their addresses leaked by Trump supporters, and there, too, threats predictably ensued.
There are plenty of hints that Trump well understands what a useful weapon this form of stochastic juror intimidation could be. He has raged furiously about Merchan’s rather narrow gag order barring him from publicly attacking witnesses, court staff and family members, or prospective jurors—and tested its boundaries by posting to Truth Social a quote from a Fox host complaining about purported “undercover liberal activists” lying their way on to his Manhattan jury.
Perhaps even more suggestively, Trump’s legal team lobbied the court not to reassure prospective jurors their identities would be protected unless they explicitly asked. Supposedly this was to avoid implying such a guarantee was necessary, which might lead some to infer (correctly) that Trump posed a danger to them. But I don’t think it takes a hardened cynic to suspect another motivation: Everyone understands at this point what happens to people demonized by Trump and his surrogates, and jurors who think their identities will be exposed must realize they’ll paint a target on their backs if they vote to convict, even in the bluest of boroughs.
I’d like to say I have a clever remedy to propose for this sate of affairs, but the reality is that I don’t see one. Adequately protecting the identities of all the jurors would require a level of restriction on the press alien to our constitutional system, and even that would frankly stand a slim chance of doing the job. Trump will predictably dance at the boundaries of Merchan’s gag order—or violate it outright just to test the judge’s will to impose consequences—and make fully clear to his army of acolytes, whether explicitly or with a wink and a nudge, that jurors who return the “wrong” verdict are traitors deserving of whatever rough justice the more deranged among his supporters are prepared to dish out. A vote to convict under these circumstances will require not just impartiality, but a hefty dose of courage as well.