Jim Brown has climbed aboard the Trump train for 2020.
Made for each other!
1965
Then-18-year-old Brenda Ayers says Brown assaulted her in a Cleveland Howard Johnson motel. Brown was charged with assault and battery.
According to an Associated Press report at the time, Ayers said Brown “plied her with whiskey, slapped her face, hip and stomach and forced her to have sex relations with him on two occasions.” She broke down while testifying in court, saying Brown called her days before testifying asking, “Why was I doing this to him?” Brown denied having sex with her and assaulting her; his defense lawyer
called it a shakedown plot for money. A Cleveland jury
found him not guilty. Ayers later sued Brown for paternity
and lost and sued for civil damages, the latter of
which she asked to be dismissed.
1968
Neighbors of Brown’s in Hollywood hear an argument and call the police. When police arrived, they found Brown’s then-girlfriend, model Eva Bohn-Chin, 22, semi-conscious beneath the balcony of Brown’s second-floor apartment. Brown was charged with assault with intent to commit murder, felony battery on a peace officer, and obstructing justice. From
Pete Dexter’s essential 1981 profile of Brown:
“The police is just another cat,” he said. The first sheriff’s deputy who came through the front door that day also went through the closet door.
“Listen,” he said, “you got to have something, goin’ out dealing with 270-pound linemen for a living. You quit playing, but that doesn’t just go away.”
The charge of assault with intent to commit murder was dropped when Eva Bohn-Chin told police she had fallen trying to get out when they showed up.
The charges by the cop were changed to resisting a deputy. Brown was fined $300 and that marked the beginning of his problems with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.
“Those suckers knew a little about my head,” he said, “and they waited for me to do something so they could shoot me. For two months they came by most every night to tell me to turn down my music.”
1971
Battery charges are dropped against Brown due to a “lack of witnesses,”
according to a report from Jet magazine. A deputy city attorney told the magazine that Brown was accused of “beating and then throwing two women, Claudia Anne Lemary and Carol Virginia Williams, both 22, out of his apartment and down a flight of stairs, allegedly because they refused to perform a sex act together.” From Jet’s recap:
During pre-trial proceedings, the two alleged victims, however, appeared with Brown and left with him, indicating all was forgiven, if indeed anything had occurred. At the trial, Miss Williams answered five questions put to her by Adajian before her attorney advised her to remain silent. She alleged she was injured at Brown’s apartment when “I fell down a flight of stairs.” But when asked if Brown was responsible for the fall, she purred, “Not to my knowledge.” Miss Lemary failed to appear.
1985
Brown is charged with raping and assaulting a 33-year-old woman in his home. The woman
testified in court that she was friends with Brown, who invited over to his home one day, but that when she tried to leave, he beat her, then raped her with the help of his then-girlfriend, Carol Moses, 23. Moses told a grand jury that she got in a physical fight with the woman, who clearly had been beaten, after the woman “made a lesbian advance toward her,” and that Brown had tried to break up that fight, the Los Angeles Times reported. Brown told reporters, “This is ridiculous. Everybody is lying.”
The charges were dismissed by a judge, according to reports, due to “inconsistent testimony,” with changes in details such as
whether Brown fully or partially penetrated her and whether he had tied her hands or forcibly held them. Research done since has shown that rape, like other traumatic events,
takes a toll on a person’s memory, especially their memories of the event itself. This is why police now are advised to
handle the interviews in sexual-assault cases differently than other crimes.
“We have a societal expectation that both the victim of a major crime and any witnesses to that crime ought to be able to remember with perfect clarity exactly what happened,” psychologist Rebecca Campbell
told the Washington Post in 2014. “It is not an expectation that has any scientific merit.”
The year after this case,
Brown told journalist Diane K. Shah that he was “very vulnerable and that “I don’t have much chance if someone wants to get me.”
1986
Brown is arrested and charged with assaulting live-in girlfriend Debra Clark. Clark, 22, told police the fight was “about a jealousy thing that happened a few days ago,”
the Los Angeles Times reported, and at one point she locked herself inside a bedroom with a gun. The charges were later dropped after Clark
said she did not want Brown prosecuted. “It was definitely overdramatized,”
Clark said afterward. If a telephone call goes to the police station and they arrive, naturally the media’s going to get into it. Basically, we had a lovers’ quarrel, and everything is fine now.”
Speaking to Shah, Brown said he probably will marry Clark but concedes he
doesn’t know how to spell his future wife’s first name.
1989
Brown’s memoir, Out of Bounds, comes out. In the book, he again said that Bohn-Chin fell from the balcony and that they had a “minor domestic dispute.” He did admit to slapping women, including Bohn-Chin, in the book. As quoted in a review in
the Los Angeles Times:
“I have also slapped other women,” he wrote. “And I never should have, and I never should have slapped Eva, no matter how crazy we were at the time. I don’t think any man should slap a woman. In a perfect world, I don’t think any man should slap anyone. ... I don’t start fights, but sometimes I don’t walk away from them. It hasn’t happened in a long time, but it’s happened, and I regret those times. I should have been more in control of myself, stronger, more adult.”