NO VERDICT AFTER SECOND DAY: Danny Masterson Trial, Day 23, end of day report

Day two has ended without a verdict. The jury will return tomorrow morning to continue on.

Everyone is hoping they reach some kind of conclusion tomorrow: As far as we know, the court will be closed all next week for Thanksgiving.

The only excitement today was the read-back of testimony that we reported on in our lunch post. The jury had requested to hear Jane Doe 1’s testimony of the phone call she made to Danny Masterson after she reached Florida in the days after the alleged April 25, 2003 attack.

One problem with the read-back was that much of that testimony involved Jane Doe 1 trying to explain the tone of her voice when she said things like “no, no, no!” when Masterson told her they had had sex.

On the stand, Jane Doe 1 had made it sound more like a protest than revealing she had been unaware of it. But when the court reporter read the testimony back, there was no inflection at all. We don’t know what the jury made of it.

One journalist, however, pointed out that the jury could not have forgotten how that sounded in court when Jane Doe 1 said it.

Naturally, there was a lot of speculation from the journalists we’re sitting with about what this meant. Are they focusing on testimony of Jane Doe 1 because they’ve already settled on verdicts for Jane Doe 2 and 3? Are they concerned about what appear to be inconsistencies in Jane Doe 1’s account of that phone call?

We just don’t know.

Yesterday, reader TX Lawyer predicted that we wouldn’t get a verdict today, based simply on the complexity of the case and the amount of testimony that the jury has heard.

He was right about that. But everyone wants this jury to solve its issues and reach verdicts on Friday. The alternative is a scheduling nightmare.

But hey, we really owe some big thanks to Mark Bunker, who broke up the monotony of the day with his great dispatch from the hearing in the Baxter v. Scientology trafficking lawsuit in Tampa. He did such a good job describing the situation, and it sounds like Judge Barber might actually have an enlightened view about Scientology’s practices.

Of course, we remember feeling the same way about Judge Steven Kleifield at the same point in the Bixler v. Scientology lawsuit before he ended up finding for Scientology arbitration. So who knows.

Anyway, we’ll see you all back here tomorrow!

---

Thank you for reading today’s story here at Substack. For the full picture of what’s happening today in the world of Scientology, please join the conversation at tonyortega.org, where we’ve been reporting daily on David Miscavige’s cabal since 2012. There you’ll find additional stories, and our popular regular daily features:

Source Code: Actual things founder L. Ron Hubbard said on this date in history

Avast, Ye Mateys: Snapshots from Scientology’s years at sea

Overheard in the Freezone: Indie Hubbardism, one thought at a time

Past is Prologue: From this week in history at alt.religion.scientology

Random Howdy: Your daily dose of the Captain

Here’s the link for today’s post at tonyortega.org

And whatever you do, subscribe to this Substack so you get our breaking stories and daily features right to your email inbox every morning…