Brandy Britton , 43, Fmr. Professor Accused Of Prostitution Found Dead
wazzzy
Authorities in Howard County say a former college professor who made
headlines last year when she was
accused of working as a call girl has been found dead at her home near
Ellicott City.
County police say 43-year-old Brandy Britton was found dead Saturday
afternoon at her home in the 10-thousand-200 block of Shirley Meadow
Court. A family member found the body.
Police say the death was an apparent suicide and there were no signs
of foul play.
Britton was arrested and charged in January 2006 with prostitution
charges after detectives reported she agreed to
provide sex for money during an undercover police operation.
Her case had not gone to trial.
Britton had a doctorate in sociology and worked at the University of
Maryland, Baltimore County from 1994 to 1999.
Hyfler/Rosner
"wazzzy" <enter...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>
> County police say 43-year-old Brandy Britton was found
> dead Saturday
> afternoon at her home in the 10-thousand-200 block of
> Shirley Meadow
> Court. A family member found the body.
I knew we shouldn't have gone on about Harding that much.
Bill Schenley
> who made headlines last year when she was accused of
> working as a call girl has been found dead at her home near
> Ellicott City.
Photo: http://www.wbaltv.com/2006/0810/9659530_320X240.jpg
A news story from last year:
The House With The Lights On
It was a neighborhood just like yours, where children rode scooters
in the cul-de-sac. And where men circled at night, looking for . . .
FROM: The Washington Post (May 21st 2006) ~
By Darragh Johnson, Staff Writer and Meg Smith, Staff Researcher
Brandy Britton is on the floor kissing Penelope, her potbelly pig.
Penelope isn't happy. She grunts, loudly, on the bare mattress in her
upstairs bedroom. Britton nuzzles her ear.
"You're a bad, bossy girl," she purrs and kisses the pig's snout.
Penelope
rolls on her side. With a set of red, square fingernails, Britton
tickles the
pig's belly.
"You're so bad," Britton says, her voice husky and deep. "Such a bad,
bossy girl."
She stands -- slender and stacked, blond curls hanging down her back
-- and walks into her bedroom. It's 11:05 p.m. The radio is tuned to
92Q,
and the DJ on "The Love Zone" is about to give away a "passion pack,"
complete with "blindfold and scented candles."
"Why don't you come in here?" Britton says, on her way to change into
something more comfortable. Just before disappearing behind a
bathroom door that doesn't entirely close, she offers:
"You can sit on the bed."
This is the 42-year-old woman police accuse of "operating a house of
prostitution at her home" on a manicured cul-de-sac in wealthy Howard
County.
The woman with a PhD in sociology, an expertise in women's studies
and
a former career as a well-regarded college professor.
The woman who one day at lunchtime earlier this year opened her front
door
to an undercover detective, led him upstairs and told him, police
would later
contend, "to undress and place the money on a table by the door." He
set
down $400, then slipped back downstairs.
Soon, several detectives and a uniformed officer were swarming into
Britton's
$400,000 house and, she says, dumping out drawers, pulling clothes
off
hangers, even sweeping the cartoon magnets off her fridge. Armed with
a
search warrant, they hauled away their evidence: 150 condoms,
lubricant,
cash, a vibrator and computer equipment.
They also snapped handcuffs around her slim wrists and took her off to
the
lockup in Jessup.
Twelve hours later, just before midnight Jan. 17, Britton's dress,
coat and
shoelaces were returned to her, and she crossed the street to a gas
station
and called a cab. She'd been booked on four counts of prostitution,
each
carrying a maximum one year in jail and/or a $500 fine. Misdemeanors.
Such cases rarely go to trial.
Britton says she's not guilty and denies the charges. She was framed,
she
says. It's a clever con job, perpetrated by her second husband.
Her trial has been rescheduled for Thursday. She is still
interviewing
attorneys.
An anonymous complaint of "prostitution activity" at her landscaped,
two-story home in Ellicott City got the vice squad's interest in March
2005.
The caller described "an unusual amount of vehicle traffic" at
Britton's
house and added, "all of the visitors were male and rarely stayed for
more
than an hour," police wrote in their request for a search warrant.
The caller also offered a Web site where, police said, they found
pictures of
"Dr. Britton," noted that she "is listed as 'Alexis,' " calls herself
a "natural
38D," advertised to a clientele "that appreciates class with a
refreshing
down to earth attitude" and gave a phone number.
Police "removed 4 bags of trash" from Britton's curb and found,
according to
their warrant application, "numerous condoms." They found another Web
site,
Alexisangel.com, now offline, with pictures and a biography that
seemed to
match Britton -- proof, police wrote, that Britton "had opened her own
agency
with other girls working for her."
Then, in December, a "concerned" woman called. She complained that
"her
husband had been visiting a prostitute," police wrote. "She had
confronted
her husband, who was spending between $300.00 and $500.00 a month on
Britton . . . for sex and fellatio.' "
In a quiet corner of suburbia, where the houses are tidy and the
children
remarkable -- Britton's neighborhood high school boasts the highest
SAT
scores in a county with some of the highest SAT scores and household
incomes in the region -- this was rare, salacious intrigue.
For months, Bonnie Sorak and other residents on Shirley Meadow Court
had speculated about the goings-on at the home of the woman known to
take walks at midnight, string Christmas lights at 4 a.m. and always
buy
candy when schoolkids went door to door. Lately, neighbors had
noticed,
men in golf shirts driving Lexuses and other nice cars seemed to be
frequenting the house. Sorak had idly wondered if Britton was dealing
drugs.
Another neighbor had joked that she must be turning tricks.
Now, as Sorak pulled up to her house, her two small children in the
backseat,
she spotted police. Hurriedly closing the garage door behind her, she
called
her husband: "The SWAT team is over there now."
Who was the woman next door?
Brandy Britton is beautiful and beguiling. Vulnerable -- it's those
huge eyes
of hers. Warm and witty, then evasive and chilly. Sexy. Unforgettable.
It's been 20 years, but Sheila Cordray can vividly recall her star
student at
Oregon State University.
"What's Brandy up to these days?" the retired sociology professor
cries into
the phone. "I haven't talked to her in years!"
"She started out," Cordray continues, "as one of the brightest
students I've
ever had. I taught for 21 years. Brandy was, at least, the top 2 or 3
student
I ever had."
In the fall of 1986, Britton tried to get into Cordray's upper-level
sociology class,
Methods of Social Research. The teacher refused. She never let
students add
her class late, and, anyway, Britton "was obviously pregnant -- about
eight
months pregnant." No way could she keep up.
But Britton was "absolutely determined," Cordray says. "It was her
second
child, and she knew what she was getting into, and she had lots of
help at
home." Nineteen years later, Cordray still recalls the details: "She
had the
baby on a [Friday] afternoon and she was back in class Monday
morning."
She earned an A. She was 23.
"She was very mature for her age," Cordray says, "and brilliant.
Really brilliant."
Her mother is on the phone. Victoria Britton doesn't speak much to
her
daughter, and when she hears of the police raid on Brandy's house, she
asks
the reporter one question: Was her granddaughter at home?
The girl, now a 19-year-old student at the University of Maryland at
College
Park, was supposed to have been in Colorado visiting her 21-year-old
brother.
"I gave her a ticket," Victoria Britton says. "But I haven't heard
from her."
A pause, then, "Oh, those poor kids."
She asks about Britton's job. She says, "I" -- pause -- "thought she
was doing
a research job." Then,
"Yes. She's had financial trouble for several years." Then, "Ah,
brother." Then,
"There is a lot. . . . She's just got some other problems that have
gone on for
years."
She says goodbye. She has to call her grandchildren.
But before hanging up, she adds one more thing about her daughter:
"She's
very supportive of women, and very sympathetic to women who have to do
-- "
She doesn't finish the sentence.
The cul-de-sac is cold and dark.
Britton has agreed to an interview, but at the appointed time, nobody
is
home but a big black dog, who barks and hurls itself against the
leaded
glass doors. There is no doorbell, just a scraggle of wires poking
outside
the doorframe.
Then she calls. She's running late, wants to meet at Starbucks. She
orders
a grande white mocha Frappuccino light with whipped cream and an
extra
shot of espresso, plus an espresso brownie -- at 9:35 at night.
Britton does not dress for practicality. Tonight, despite the chill,
she wears
high-heel wedge sandals and thin brown pants that flare when she
walks.
She's got bangs and long, loose ringlets in her hair, and her lips
glimmer
with a petal-pink gloss that's very Bobbi Brown -- very wedding-day
pale.
She hates that the reporter called her mother.
"We don't talk," she snaps.
But she asks what her mom said. The anger drains from her face. The
answer
to her next question matters very much.
"Did she believe it?"
For the next hour, Britton pulls at the Frappuccino straw as if she's
at the
malt shop and tells the story of a conventional girlhood near
Portland, on a
berry farm in Boring. "There was a big sign." She laughs.
"Welcome to Boring, Oregon."
When she was little, she played dress-up with her sister. In high
school?
Track, swim team, cheerleader. She wrote a column for the school
paper
called "Brandy Bears It." Coyly, she explains, "We were the Bruins."
A guy in a green apron interrupts. They're closing.
Britton stands and offers to lead the way back to her house. She
points
to the parking lot. "I'm in the old burgundy Nissan."
Her voice rises.
"Even though I run a prosti tution ring" -- the heads of two customers
whip
around and stare -- " supposedly ," she emphasizes, "I don't have any
money."
What happened? Britton was such a remarkable young woman, the
first in her family to go to college when she entered Oregon State at
19,
"a starry-eyed little girl who wants to be a vet," she says. She wound
up
majoring in biology and sociology and took seriously the professor
who
told her, "It's not enough to study the problems of the world. We have
to
do something about them."
She became an activist. While earning two degrees, with honors, and
rearing two children with her first husband, Britton volunteered at a
battered women's shelter and helped create the university's first
"safe
ride" program for escorting women on campus at night.
By the time she turned 30, she was finishing her PhD in sociology
from
the University of California at San Francisco and would soon be
headed
east to an assistant professorship at the University of Maryland
Baltimore County.
At first, in Baltimore, things went well. Very well.
Other professors called her work "really top-notch" and "invaluable."
The
College of Arts and Sciences dean praised her "outstanding service
record" and mentoring skills. Her students wrote letters:
"When your life as a woman is difficult," read a note from Bonnie
Woodall, dated Dec. 16, 1996, "and you think that what you do is in
vain, remember the students you have taught. . . . You have made a
difference."
When Britton got a raise, her department chairman, Derek Gill, sent a
personal note of congratulations. When she received a $1.6 million
grant
from the National Institutes of Health to study the link between
violence
and drug use in poor women in Baltimore, he called it "a remarkable
achievement for an Assistant Professor in her third year of UMBC."
But the workload was taxing -- and getting worse. Britton asked for
extra
compensation. Gill agreed. The university didn't. Her request was
denied,
although a similar request by a male colleague was granted.
More injustice, she perceived. Her activism took over. Her mother had
taught her to "fight back," as Britton wrote in the dedication to her
dissertation. So she did.
Memos circulated back and forth, creating in her department (as one
memo put it) "a blizzard of written and verbal communication." There
were
investigations into Britton's NIH grant; grumblings by her fellow
faculty and
complaints by students that included, according to court papers,
Britton's
"calling them late at night and demanding they come to her house for
something work related and then failing to answer the door."
Only a few years earlier, she had experienced a similar undoing in
California: She left her job researching drug abuse amid a blaze of
litigation -- and sued her employer for gender discrimination. Now,
in
Baltimore, Britton's life was imploding again. She filed another
gender
discrimination lawsuit, this time suing UMBC for $10 million. (A
federal
judge would later dismiss the case; a UMBC spokesman declined to
discuss the case while Britton's appeal is pending.) Just before
Christmas
1999, she quit the university she once saw "as a stepping stone."
By then, many in her department had turned against her -- a corrosive
fact made obvious when her department chairman had a heart attack.
Britton asked about visiting Gill in the hospital. Instead, she
alleged in
court papers, she received a voice mail from the graduate student
dating
Gill:
"Brandy . . . this is a message direct from Dr. Gill. There is no
person on
Earth he'd rather see less than you. . . . Stay away from him, leave
us
alone. You have been a major contributor to this."
The Frappuccino is half-finished.
She has changed into black sweats, black cardigan and an oversized
Testudo's Troops T-shirt, and she materializes in her bedroom -- a
place
of Asian-inspired tranquility, complete with a canopy bed draped in
chiffon, beaded curtains and floating shelves of Asian statues.
Crawling onto the bed, she sits cross-legged and talks for another 4
1/2
hours. Night turns to early morning, and she periodically stands at
the end
of her bed, stroking the skin of her lower stomach and upper thigh.
It's an
unconscious habit, like twirling her hair or picking at her cuticles.
She believes, she is saying, her colleagues at UMBC got together and
decided, "How are we going to do her in?" She believes they
wiretapped
her phones and put her under other kinds of surveillance. "I was
devoted,"
she continues. "I spent my whole life working for that. . . . It
wasn't just a
job to me. It was my life." She left UMBC and "just thought, 'I'm
going to
lay down and die. I'm so depressed.' "
Since quitting, she has filed for bankruptcy twice and struggled
against
five foreclosures on her Ellicott City home. In 2001, she filed a
$30,000
lawsuit after a car accident, settling later for an undisclosed
amount.
For about seven months, between October 2003 and April 2004, Britton
worked for the Baltimore City Public Schools in the research
department.
Ask where she's worked in the past couple of years, and she starts to
answer, then suddenly recommends a book: "Sex Work: Writings by
Women in the Sex Industry."
"It's been a descent for Brandy," her mother says. "Life was going
badly
. . . . She wanted someone there for her."
That someone turned out to be Isamu Tubyangye.
They met online in March 2002, when Tubyangye answered her
Yahoo.com personal ad. He was a 6-foot-5, 31-year-old who worked,
she says, for AOL.
Three months later, they married, and over the next three years,
Britton, who wrote her dissertation on battered women, filed several
domestic violence reports against Tubyangye: "He assaulted me with
. . . wooden shoes, a chair"; "tied me up with strapping tape";
"stabbed me in the neck." In a request for a restraining order
against
him, she wrote: "He attacked me when I tried to discuss separation."
Though she filed for divorce six months after their wedding, the
paperwork was never finalized.
Tubyangye, who did not respond to repeated voice and e-mail
messages asking for an interview, was charged several times with
first- and second-degree assault. He, too, petitioned the Howard
County court with his own accusations, including that Britton's
request
for a restraining order came a convenient seven days "after I had
given
her all of my student loan money . . . $8600," and "my wife is in
possession of an unregistered firearm."
By the beginning of last year, Tubyangye was charged with two
counts of second-degree assault and one count of violating his
probation
by violating the restraining order. A bench warrant was issued, and he
was
briefly jailed in March 2005. That's when, Britton says, he attempted
to
frame her by directing police to a Web site where Britton appeared to
be
advertising herself as a prostitute.
And now, she says, "they've decided to go after me instead of him."
But what about the other Web site? The Alexis Angel Web site. The
defunct site that police say shows she had "other girls working for
her."
The site with erotic pictures of the naked front and back sides of a
woman
who looks a whole lot like Britton. The site that begins with this
disclaimer:
"Money exchanged . . . for modeling is simply for my time and
companionship. . . . This is not an offer of prostitution."
The site where Alexis is described as a "quintessential 'brick house'
" and "sophisticated, refined, educated and articulate. She has two
Bachelor of Science degrees, one in biology and the other in
sociology.
She also holds a Ph.D. from an elite university." It continues: "An
athlete,
cheerleader and dancer in high school, Alexis has continued her . . .
training
and is extremely flexible in excellent shape." It ends, "I AM VERY
CREATIVE AND LOVE TO TRY NEW THINGS."
Alexis's fees rival those of a K Street lawyer. An "incall" (at her
house)
service for "individual clients" runs $300 per hour, $550 for two
hours, $800
for three hours. Couples pay almost double those rates, and "two-girl
services"
cost more than double.
The phone number on the site is Britton's cell.
The domain name is registered to her.
The question is asked:
What about Alexis Angel?
The woman who can make a Frappuccino last six hours and discuss --
at length -- everything from playing dress-up to fighting for
underprivileged
women, takes a final draw on her green Starbucks straw. She sets the
plastic cup on the nightstand.
Her face has hardened.
"I can't discuss that with you."
Now there's a new Web site, featuring "Claire."
This site displays an open antique book and a still life of French
wine, plump grapes and fine cheese -- and a gallery of erotic photos
of a nearly naked woman, adorned only in a selection of feather boas,
garter belts and bits of black lingerie.
Like Alexisangel.com, the site offers a bio of Claire as
"sophisticated,
refined, educated and articulate. She holds a post-graduate degree
from
an elite university." And: "An athlete, cheerleader and dancer since
childhood, Claire has continued her dance and athletic training and
is
extremely flexible and in excellent physical shape." Linked reviews
praise
Claire in quite complimentary terms. Exults one: "She took several
months
off and is just back!! It has been 3 very long months waiting for
her!!!"
On Mother's Day, in the late afternoon, Britton answers her front
door,
agitated and dressed in a little red T-shirt, black nylon shorts and
bare
feet. She is upstairs "with my kids," she says, and can't talk to the
reporter now. She says goodbye and begins closing her leaded glass
door, and for a moment, the words of her T-shirt are caught in the
frame
of the door:
"Bad Girl," it says across her chest, "with good intentions."
Brad Ferguson
<rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
The coverup continues.
Charlene
> Armed with a search warrant, they hauled away
> their evidence: 150 condoms, lubricant,
> cash, a vibrator and computer equipment.
That's like a good weekend in Vegas.
wd42
The Kentucky Wizard
Ack! You know the rules, what happen in Vegas, *stays* in Vegas.
--
Never argue with an idiot; they'll drag you down to their level and
beat you with experience.
© The Wiz ®
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