LYNN – An Essex County jury found a nationally renowned educator not guilty of molesting a 9-year-old girl in 2006.”We are gratified that justice has prevailed,” defense attorney Max Stern said after the verdict.Douglas Reeves, 60, of Boston, was found not guilty of indecent assault and battery on a child under 14. Reeves, the founder and head of the Leadership and Learning Center in Denver, has maintained his innocence since his arraignment on the charge in August 2012 and emphatically denied the charge when on the witness stand Wednesday.Prosecutors argued Reeves sexually assaulted the 9-year-old girl when the girl and her family stayed overnight at Reeves’ home in Swampscott during a family vacation in July 2006.But Stern argued the girl, now 15, made up the accusation in 2012 in response to suggestive questions from a therapist and an overactive fantasy life that involved daydreaming about strong women who protected the weak.Stern said the girl made up the story simply to gain her parents’ attention, but the parents later became obsessed with prosecuting Reeves. The defense attorney pointed to inconsistencies in the girl’s statements to police and testimony during the trial as evidence the young woman could not keep her story straight. Reeves told jurors the stakes were too high to believe such a “fantasy.””Let me not mince words,” Stern said at the start of his closing argument Wednesday. “You are going to be asked to label this man as a child molester, as a sex offender, a stigma that he would have to go through, to have, for the rest of his life ? it will be the end of his life as he knows it.”Jurors deliberated approximately four hours Thursday before returning the not guilty verdict.Reeves and family members declined to comment after the verdict, as did jurors and the accuser’s family.