Vanity Fair writer booted from NYC murder-for-hire jury for tweeting about ‘hot FBI agent’
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NEW YORK — A Vanity Fair writer was tossed from a federal jury in a Brooklyn murder-for-hire trial because she tweeted about the “hot FBI agent” on the case, The New York Daily News has learned.
The juror, Delia Cai, professed her feelings in a now-deleted pair of posts on X earlier this week, then joked about getting spiked from the jury in posts on Tuesday.
She posted her two offending tweets on Monday, according to court sources, first writing, “didn’t get to see the eclipse bc I’m on federal jury duty but I did get to look at a hot fbi agent” and following up with “we’re literally not allowed to talk to each other outside the courtroom … if I say hi he legally has to ignore me… don’t they know this is how I fall in love.”
In an interview with the Daily News Thursday, Cai said she was embarrassed by what happened.
“I’ve never served jury duty before. I never interacted with the criminal justice system. I think I went in pretty naively,” she said. “It was not my intention to make light of something as serious as a murder trial.”
She added that she didn’t think at the time that posting generally about her jury duty experience was against the rules.
“I’m sure if I thought about it for five more minutes, I would have understood that that was hugely inappropriate,” she said, adding that she has “posting disease” and tweets about everything in her life. “In this case I made a really bad internet joke, and there were consequences.
“I was so dead in the brain after that whole day, and I was just trying to be funny, which is what I do when things happen in my life,” she said.
Cai was selected as a juror for the trial of Antony Abreu, a convicted drug trafficker from Queens accused of assassinating a man in 2019 at the behest of a Manhattan real estate developer.
The feds say Abreu’s target was Xin “Chris” Gu, who was gunned down outside a Queens karaoke bar on Feb. 12, 2019 at the behest of his former boss, Qing Ming “Allen” Yu.
Yu, who was convicted of murder for hire last October, was blinded by rage and revenge after Gu — his former protege and project manager — started his own business and took several of his clients.
Abreu was the man who pulled the trigger, federal prosecutors allege. On Thursday, jurors got to hear testimony from You You, Yu’s ne’er do well nephew, who admitted to helping his uncle plot the killing and has turned government witness in the hopes of a lenient sentence.
Cai covers celebrities and culture as a senior Vanities correspondent at Vanity Fair, recently writing profiles of Jada Pinkett Smith, “Past Lives” and “The Morning Show” actress Greta Lee, and Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz. She’s also the author of the 2023 book “Central Places.”
Judge Carol Bagley Amon admonished Cai and booted her from the case on Tuesday, after officials spotted her saucy social media musings, courtroom sources said.
She apologized to the judge, saying that she didn’t realize her posts — which didn’t mention any specifics about the case — violated the court’s orders, one courtroom source said.
Shortly after, she posted on X, “anyway so i got kicked out of jury duty for posting about it …. learn from this what you will….,” then followed up with, “judge said girl go to horny jail :/”
In another post, she wrote, “omg…. well turns out if you post ‘fbi man hot’ you are a bad horny citizen,” she tweeted, then, in a reply to a follower, she said, “I’m ready to serve just not the way they intended.”
Cai told the Daily News that even though she took it in stride online and continued to joke about it, “I’m obviously horrified. I’m so sorry. I was just making a joke.”
“That’s just like the mode I am with life in general. I’ll tweet about getting dumped,” she added. “I did not understand the stakes. I did not take the gravity of the situation into account.”
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