Split between six men and six women ranging in age from their 20s to 70s, they form a broad ethnic mix that represents the diverse city they hail from.

Unlike in the UK, the US legal system offers much more transparency about jurors and their backgrounds, while both the prosecution and defence teams can even veto candidates they do not want. The defence in Ms Maxwell’s case had 10 challenges, while the government had six.

“It strikes me that if you’re Ghislaine Maxwell’s defence attorney, the task of picking a jury is almost an impossible one for you,” Jerald Podair, a lawyer and history professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, explained to Courthouse News about the difficulties facing Ms Maxwell’s team.

The Telegraph understands that Ms Maxwell’s heavyweight team of attorneys, who have been paid upwards of $7million (£5m) for the case, hired a jury consultant to work with the British socialite.

Observing her in court, the 59-year-old appears acutely aware of how she may be being perceived by the jury; uncrossing her arms when they enter Manhattan’s Thurgood Marshall courthouse and showing little emotion during even the most graphic testimony.

Sat on the back row is juror number 29 – a white man in his 40s often seen clutching a Starbucks coffee and diligently taking notes. He studied information strategy at university and is now vice president of quality at a life-sciences company.

He revealed during the screening process that his husband is an architect and they enjoy playing board games. He said of Ms Maxwell: “I don’t think I have heard anything in particular related to her. I have heard of, obviously, Jeffrey Epstein.”

The jurors were given numbers to protect their anonymity, and have been ordered not to read any news coverage of the case until the trial is over.

But what sort of jurors does Ms Maxwell’s team want?

Mr Podair says that the defence would not necessarily want younger people because they may be especially more “culturally attuned to issues of sexual harassment and abuse,” in the #Metoo era.

Some experts say that women, on the whole, could be bad for a woman accused of sexual misconduct. While others suggest that, perhaps unexpectedly, when dealing with abuse with female victims, older women jurors may actually tend to be harder on the young women accusers.