Michael S. Jeffries, the former Chief Executive of Abercrombie and Fitch, who was accused of running an international ring with sex trade, was found unsuitable on Friday for a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s.
In an order of three pages, Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury wrote of the eastern district of New York that Mr. Jeffries “suffered from a mental illness or a defect made him mentally incompetent.” Judge Choudhury also ordered that Mr. Jeffries was admitted to the hospital for four months to observe or improve his condition.
The ruling followed a letter submitted last month by Mr. Jeffries’s lawyers, Brian H. Bieber and Alek Ubieta. They wrote that, based on the independent evaluation of three doctors, Mr. Jeffries, 80, had serious dementia and Alzheimer’s, who “ensures continuous decline over time.” The condition meant that Mr Jeffries could not understand the charges with which he was confronted, his lawyers wrote.
Mr. Jeffries was accused last October that he forced dozens of men in sex with him from 2008 to 2015, using his position as Chief Executive of the clothing store to exploit models sexually who were motivated to promote their career. He had not guilty.
In collaboration with his romantic partner, Matthew Smith, and a third person, James Jacobson, Mr. Jeffries attracted the men to secret sex parties with the possibility that they would receive modeling jobs, federal prosecutors said. Mr. Smith and Mr. Jacobson are also accused of sex trade and, like Mr. Jeffries, have not been guilty.
According to public prosecutors, the men who forced Mr Jeffries and his co-defenders were not allowed to leave the sex parties. In addition to being forced to sex, they were made to consume alcohol, drugs and Viagra. The charges echoed claims in a class-action right case that was submitted against Abercrombie in 2023 and reported in a BBC research.
The defendants ‘used their money and influence to hunt for vulnerable men for their own sexual satisfaction,’ said Breon Peace, the former American lawyer for the eastern district, in a statement last October.
Although Mr. Jeffries was credited in the early 1990s for saving Abercrombie from bankruptcy, the company was confronted with a variety of crises under his stewardship, well before last year’s criminal indictment.
When Mr. Jeffries left the company in 2014, the company was confronted with a recoil about what many customers saw as his Hympersexualized images of young modelsAnd it was a continuous sliding sale.
In 2004, Abercrombie agreed to pay $ 40 million To arrange a Class-Action right case that accused the company of choosing white employees over black, Spanish and Asian employees. In 2012 it was confronted Age discrimination for lawsuit That claimed that employees on the Gulfstream -Jet of Abercrombie were obliged to respond to Mr. Jeffries’s requests with ‘no problem’.
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