Manhattan Trump-trial jurors and Michael Cohen's family doxxed in days following May 2024 guilty verdict

What happened

On May 30, 2024, a Manhattan jury found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 counts in the criminal hush-money trial. Within a day, posts on pro-Trump forums and Truth Social called for the jurors to be identified and named.

NBC News reported on May 31 that some posts circulated photos pulled from social media, claimed to identify individual jurors, and carried threats of violence. The 12 jurors had stayed anonymous throughout the trial under the court's protective order. Reporting did not confirm that any juror's real home address was published. The effort was coordinated and high in volume.

Days later, Michael Cohen's family was doxxed after he testified for the prosecution. The Guardian reported on June 4 that personal information about Cohen's family had been posted online. Addresses and phone numbers for his wife and children appeared on a site used to target other figures in Trump's legal cases. Cohen said the family started getting unwanted calls and messages, and he asked people to stop spreading the information.

How it started

The juror-identification attempts followed a crowdsourced pattern. Someone posts an open call. Volunteers dig through public posts, court sketches, and people-search results. Guesses get amplified before anyone confirms them. The same pattern produced the Ferguson misidentification in 2014, when people online named the wrong man as the officer in a police shooting.

The Cohen doxxing worked differently. Cohen had been a public figure for years, and his testimony made him the central witness in the case. The information posted about his family came off the same people-search pages that return an address from a name, the ones anyone can query.

Why this case matters

This page covers the jurors and witnesses in the Manhattan trial doxxing cluster. The companion case, Manhattan trial officials doxxing, covers the incidents involving Letitia James and Judge Merchan's family.

Civilian trial participants faced a different exposure than the officials. The judges, the attorney general, the district attorney, and the prosecutors had security details and, in some cases, statutory protections and threat-assessment support. The jurors had a court protective order that lasted only as long as the trial. Once the verdict came in, that order did little for their privacy away from the courthouse.

Witnesses sit in a third category. They are called by subpoena or cooperation, and Cohen's family had no court order at all. The people-search sites that return an address from a name do not check whether the person searching is looking for a juror, a witness, a judge, or anyone else.

What this means for you

If you are a juror, a witness, or anyone pulled into a high-profile proceeding, the privacy the court gives you ends when the case does. The address that surfaces in a post-verdict thread is usually the one already listed on people-search sites.

New York's Address Confidentiality Program shields a narrow class of enrolled victims (domestic violence, stalking, sexual offense, human trafficking, and kidnapping) plus reproductive health care providers and patients, not jurors or witnesses. The federal Daniel Anderl Act lets federal judges demand that data brokers remove their home address, and it does not reach jurors or trial witnesses. No statute automatically pulls a juror or witness off people-search sites.

Removing your address from those sites is the one step most civilians can take on their own. The fewer sites that return your name when a verdict drops, the less material a targeting effort has to work with.

For more on how doxxing chains together, see /doxxing. For the officials side of this cluster, see Manhattan trial officials doxxing.