Why Celebrities Are Rallying Behind Cyntoia Brown, a Woman Spending Life in Prison
“We were very, very appreciative of the fact that such an incredible number of celebrities would join our plea,” said Charles
Bone, a lawyer in Nashville who took Ms. Brown’s case pro bono seven years ago and spoke to her by phone on Tuesday.
“She was kind, intelligent, she had a disposition or presence about her that was just amazing.”
He described Ms. Brown as “extremely remorseful,” but said she also thinks “it was unjust
what had happened in her life, and what a 40-year-old man was doing to her.”
Bone said his client hopes to focus her energy on combating sex trafficking.
“She was thrilled by the fact that people really cared.”
Ms. Brown’s birth mother testified that she drank a fifth of whiskey every day while she was pregnant,
and Ms. Brown showed telltale signs of fetal alcohol syndrome, which slows brain development, Mr.
She was adopted by a family in Clarksville, Tenn., but dropped out of elementary school and ran away to Nashville.
When she was 16, she lived in a motel with a pimp known as “Kut Throat” who raped and abused her while forcing her to become a prostitute, Mr.
“He would explain to me that some people were born whores, and
that I was one, and I was a slut, and nobody’d want me but him, and the best thing I could do was just learn to be a good whore,” she testified, according to The Associated Press.