If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.
Gigi Jordan, the multimillionaire pharmaceutical executive convicted of killing her 8-year-old autistic son inside an upscale New York City hotel room, was found dead at home on Friday morning, reports say.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor had issued an order hours earlier revoking Jordan’s bail.
The 62-year-old was convicted of manslaughter in 2014 in connection to the death of her son, Jude Mirra.
The socialite from Belgium allegedly admitted to using a syringe to plunge a lethal cocktail of painkillers, tranquilizers and sleeping pills mixed with alcohol and orange juice down the boy’s throat inside their $2,300-a-night suite at the luxury Peninsula Hotel in Manhattan in February 2010.
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Part of her defense was that she intended a murder-suicide, as Jordan also ingested several medications herself and emailed a relative, who reportedly alerted authorities. But prosecutors argued that as her autistic son was dying, she used her laptop to pull $125,000 from his trust fund, N.Y. Daily News reported.
Jordan was sentenced to 18 years in prison on the manslaughter charge, but a Manhattan federal judge in 2020 granted bail amid her ongoing appeals for a new trial.
Her appeals centered on 15 minutes, during which the courtroom was briefly closed to the public during her trial.
Lower courts have maintained that Jordan’s Sixth Amendment right to a public trial was not infringed upon.
"At one point during the two-month trial, the trial court closed the courtroom to the public for approximately fifteen minutes to hear arguments about a website and email by petitioner that accused the court of undermining the fairness of the trial," Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office wrote to the Supreme Court last month. "The only impact of the closed proceeding was that, once the courtroom reopened, the court repeated an earlier instruction to the jury not to consume media coverage about the trial; later the same day, the court unsealed the minutes of the closed proceeding and two exhibits that had been marked during it."
Citing unnamed officials, WNBC reported that Jordan was found dead in a bathtub just five minutes after midnight Friday morning inside a Brooklyn residence she was renting with a note nearby. Not immediately ruled a suicide, a medical examiner will determine the official cause of death.
Jordan’s lawyer, Norman Siegel, also confirmed her death to news outlets. The attorney said he last spoke to Jordan by phone around 7:30 p.m. Thursday, and she "sounded in good spirits."
"It’s unbelievably sad. Gigi Jordan had a lot to offer society," Siegel told Daily News. "In the end, she did not have her opportunity to contribute to society."
