| Sex
Trafficking Trial Has Smirking Defendant
and Kidnapped DOJ Witness, Redacted
Florida
By Matthew
Russell Lee, Patreon
BBC
- Guardian
UK - Honduras
- ESPN
SDNY COURTHOUSE,
Nov 19 – Natalie Rodriguez
worked as a prostitute on Long
Island for Justin Rivera, in
2015 and 2016.
On June 8, 2021
she testified against him, in
a plexiglass booth before a
dozen masked jurors in the
U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of New York.
Inner City Press was there,
and files this report.
Justin
Rivera, who spends his nights
in the Metropolitan
Correctional Center now, sat
in a purple sweater at the
defense table, listening to
the audio tapes as they
played.
In one,
Natalie called him "Daddy." In
another, he told her to snatch
jewelry from clients, and to
put $1000 (a band) in his jail
commissary account. In one
final jail call, he told her
to come upstate and rent a
hotel room. She refused,
pregnant with her son, she
said.
As she testified,
and was questioned by the
Assistant US Attorney about
what kind of sex she had with
clients, Natalie Rodriguez
alternately glared, sipped
water, and played with her
hair.
In the
gallery, next to Inner City
Press which was specifically
admonished not to use its cell
phone (having been ordered by
Judge Engelmayer once before,
in the Tekashi69 case, to not
"tweet in my courtroom"), were
two women. It seemed possible
they were relatives of Natalie
Rodriguez.
But Justin Rivera
turned around and smiled at
them.
At 4:55 pm,
SDNY Judge Paul A. Engelmayer
called it a day and let the
jury go.
Then Natalie
Rodriguez left the courtroom,
with what appeared to be two
guards. Or were they U.S.
Marshalls, like the one who
brought Rivera over from the
MCC?
Later,
back in the SDNY Press Room,
Inner City Press which had
covered the first version of
this case, pre-COVID, found
out that Rodriguez had been
sent to Florida by Rivera,
something the prosecution is
trying to keep from the jury.
The US
Attorney's Office filed a
letter, that it wanted
entirely sealed, about the
Florida trip.
Now in the
docket, heavily redacted, it
says that "the Government may
ask the jury, for instance, to
infer that the defendant had
no problem with Ms. Rodriguez
remaining in Florida for a
short time period because, in
the afther of her kidnapping,
the bruises to Ms. Rodriguez'
face made her useless to the
defendant as a
prostitute."
During this
kidnapping, on June 19, 2015,
Natalie Rodriguez was beaten
and questions about Rivera's
potention involving in a June
3, 2015 shooting in Wyandanch,
New York, in which three
people were killed in a sports
utility vehicle.
Then seven
paragraphs are
redacted.
The case is US v.
Justin Rivera, 19-cr-131
(Engelmayer).
If it were US v.
Jeffrey Epstein, or now US v.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the
courtroom would be full and
there would be more reports
that this. Watch this site.
***
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