An Uncool Adult Gets A Two-Year Suspension

A two-year suspension was recently ordered by a Colorado Hearing Board

Through an anonymous text on an online application, Brian M. Reed Benight (“Respondent”) volunteered to fulfill a teenage girl’s request for alcohol. When Respondent and the fifteen-year-old met, Respondent sexually assaulted her, groping her breasts and vaginal area over her clothes without her consent. Respondent eventually pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact, a class-one misdemeanor. This misconduct warrants a two-year suspension.

The attorney was admitted in 2013.

The story

On the afternoon of November 24, 2014, J.F., a fifteen-year-old at the time, posted an anonymous text on an online application called Whisper, requesting that someone buy her alcohol. As J.F. explained, Whisper allows people to make untraceable, anonymous posts; the text of the post remains on the application until the user logs off, when the text disappears and cannot be recovered. Respondent, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer who had married just three months earlier, answered J.F.’s Whisper post and volunteered to buy her alcohol.

Respondent testified that although he knew buying alcohol for a minor was “wrong and illegal,” he stepped forward because he wanted to be like “that cool adult” who helped him procure alcohol as an adolescent. “I was in a very weird mental state,” he recalled.

Both J.F. and Respondent testified that there was mention of an exchange of her panties for the alcohol. J.F. also requested that Respondent send his picture to her so that she could form a judgment about him, but he did not. The two arranged to meet around 12:30 p.m. the next day, in a parking lot behind the Target store in Arvada. Respondent told J.F. to arrive alone. J.F. gave Respondent her cell phone number so that they could be in contact.

Respondent, who serves as the sole in-house attorney for a construction company in Littleton, went to work the next morning. At mid-day he left his office, stopped at a liquor store to buy vodka, and then drove to Arvada to meet J.F. He backed into a parking space by a tree behind Target, near the loading docks, where the parking spots are somewhat secluded.

J.F. was inside Target with her friend when she received a text from Respondent. The two teenagers exited Target and walked to the back of the lot. J.F. testified that she brought $25.00 with her, thinking that she could simply pay Respondent for the vodka rather than give him pictures or panties.

She approached Respondent’s truck, while her friend milled around in the area. Respondent asked her name, and he told her his name. He said she was beautiful. Then he showed her the bottle and asked her to get into his truck, offering to take the keys out of the ignition so she could be sure he would not drive away. She declined. He repeated his request, she said, and asked her to get in the backseat to remove her panties. Again she refused. He opened his door and swung his legs out of the vehicle so his feet rested on the ground, while he tried to coax her into the truck.

His persistence led J.F. to believe that “things were getting a little bit too far,” so she pulled out her cell phone and positioned it in such a way to make Respondent think that she was texting. Instead, she said, she pulled up Snapchat, another online application that, among other things, allows users to make a video, write a caption for the video, and text or post the video instantaneously. J.F. explained that she wanted to surreptitiously record Respondent so that “if anything happened” to her, she would “have a record of what he looked like.” She captured a three- or four-second video of Respondent, which shows his hands reaching out to her, grabbing her sweatshirt, and pulling her toward him.  She immediately posted the video, which she captioned “Help me.”

When Respondent pulled J.F. toward him, he saw her friend wandering around near the passenger side of the truck. Without J.F.’s consent, Respondent then touched J.F.’s breasts and her vaginal area over the top of her clothes. J.F. testified that she felt “scared” and she “froze.”  She remembered being afraid that Respondent might “put” her in his car and drive away. She stepped back from Respondent just as her friend approached. According to J.F., Respondent then shut his car door, gave her the bottle, and drove away.

Respondent remembers it differently: he says he then offered to give both adolescents a ride back to the front of the Target store, but they rejected the offer and he left.

J.F. and her friend returned to J.F.’s house. Soon after, Officer Kevin Lewis arrived, having been dispatched to check on J.F. after one of her friends saw her posted video and grew concerned. J.F. told Lewis that while she was in Target’s front parking lot, Respondent pulled up, rolled down his window, and grabbed her shirt to pull her toward him while touching his penis over his pants.   Lewis continued to investigate.

Sometime that evening, Respondent texted J.F.—inadvertently, he said—asking, “What happened to you today?” She responded, “Who is this?” He replied, “Sorry wrong number.” She texted back “ok.” Around 8:30 that night, Lewis called Respondent to ask whether he had been in contact with a juvenile that day. According to Lewis, Respondent said that he did not recall talking to a juvenile. Lewis testified that Respondent was “not at all forthcoming” and soon asked to call Lewis back. About three hours later, Respondent’s lawyer contacted Lewis. Respondent turned himself in and was arrested that night.

He was convicted of a misdemeanor sex offense.

The Board rejected his request for a stayed suspension

Respondent…emphasizes that the primary purpose of our disciplinary system is not punishment, but protection of the public. He argues, to that end, that the public is already protected here because he must register as a sex offender and must strictly adhere to his probationary conditions. Thus, he reckons, a fully stayed suspension of nine months, coupled with a three-year period of probation, is appropriate…

Here, Respondent intentionally inflicted harm on a minor for his own sexual gratification—the type of misconduct that has been deemed a crime of moral turpitude by many courts. The mitigating factors are outweighed by those in aggravation. And established precedent suggests that, at a minimum, a lengthy served suspension—in line with “changing societal attitudes toward sexual assault crimes”—is warranted. With these considerations in mind, we conclude that Respondent should be suspended for two years.

(Mike Frisch)