Singer Chris Brown, who was detained in Paris on Monday while police investigated allegations of aggravated rape and drug use, was released late Tuesday evening with no charges filed, according to the AP. Brown has denied the allegations.
Brown’s accuser, a 24-year-old model whose name has not been released, filed a police complaint claiming that the singer, his friend, and his bodyguard assaulted her in the early morning hours of Jan 16. She partied with them at the Crystal Lounge in Paris’s 8th arrondissement on the night of the 15th before returning to Brown’s hotel, the Mandarin Oriental. There, she alleged in an interview with French magazine Closer, the singer’s bodyguard took everyone’s cell phones—which sent up no alarms given his notoriety—and she, about fifteen other women, and Brown’s entourage had a cocaine-fueled party in his suite. By her account, the singer caught her by the arm when she was headed to the bathroom, pulled her into a dressing room, and raped her in a manner she described as “brutal et violent.” After Brown let her out, she says, one of his friends led her to believe he would help retrieve her cell phone from the bodyguard. Instead, she says, Brown’s friend dragged her to his room, locked her in, and sexually assaulted her again, before the bodyguard took his turn. She reported the incident a few days later.
Brown, who was detained along with the two other suspects, denied the charges in an Instagram post, writing that they were “FALSE AND A WHOLE LOT OF CAP!” The picture he chose was worth at least a thousand words about Chris Brown, although it only contained three:
Brown has been in and out of legal trouble for the last decade, since pleading guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna. He is also being sued over a rape that allegedly took place at his home in February of 2017, and is awaiting trial on felony battery charges from an altercation with a photographer over the summer. Last (and very much least), he’s scheduled to be arraigned on Feb. 6 for misdemeanor charges stemming from keeping a capuchin monkey named Fiji without a permit, a crime California Fish and Wildlife agents discovered when he posted a picture of the monkey to Instagram earlier this month. The Paris prosecutor’s office says their investigation is ongoing, but for now, Brown has been authorized to leave France.
