Willem Marx

It was actually remarkably somber, to be honest, Billy.

The number of counts and obviously the number of defendants, three, meant that the announcement, as it were, by the foreperson of the jury went on for quite some time because the judge was having to ask on each individual count for each individual defendant.

whether the jury had found them guilty or not guilty.

So that took some time to get through.

The three brothers, flanked by their various attorneys, sat there in silence.

At the end of it, one of the brothers kind of put his head in his hands.

One of the twins slumped back into his chair when he heard the final word, guilty.

On the final tenth count, the parents looked shell-shocked, and one of the wives, within a few moments, was

pretty cheerful.

As for the rest of the courtroom, including the jurors,

Very, very quiet until they were discharged by the judge and the marshals escorted the rest of us out of the courtroom.

There were 11 women who were brave enough to testify in this trial about what had happened to them.

Many of them wept openly and at length on the stand.

That was very powerful for the jurors, very powerful for those of us in the courtroom to understand the trauma they'd been through.

And many of them had corroboration in the form of outcry witnesses is their technically term.

Those are people who they had told about well before this became a huge public scandal.

And that was used to buttress their account of what had happened to them.

There were also some experts talking about the role of drugs in this case, although not based on specific knowledge of the evidence in this case, but more broadly about the way that certain drugs react inside the human body and their experience of sexual assault victims, perhaps those that have been aided by pharmacological substances of the kind that

the prosecution alleged the brothers had been using and then there was also someone able to talk about the way that trauma operates in the mind and these were so consistent the way they talked about the experiences of witnesses on the stand although they'd not seen details of the case itself that would i imagine have been very persuasive for the jury to understand that that is

essentially what happened to so many of these women of the 11 who testified eight testified to have been drugged in the past and there were some videos a lot of seems text messages some blogs yeah i would say one of my takeaways as a non-american in case you couldn't tell from the accent is the power of the u.s federal government to really break down into immense detail