Chris Brown case: Attorney says prosecutors are lying

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Singer Chris Brown’s lawyer fired back Wednesday at the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, accusing prosecutors of conducting their own “fraudulent” investigation into claims that the entertainer had failed to fulfill his community service on a 2009 assault conviction.

Attorney Mark Geragos said there were countless examples of officials in Virginia witnessing Brown carrying out his court-ordered manual labor, which he said included shredding documents at the Richmond Police Department and cleaning the agency’s stables.

He angrily disputed the district attorney’s claim that there were numerous discrepancies between a report prepared by Richmond police about the number of hours Brown had served and the R&B singer’s actual schedule. Geragos cited an email Richmond police sent to the district attorney’s office late Tuesday in which the department’s general counsel accused Los Angeles prosecutors of including false statements in a court motion that questioned how much labor Brown completed.

“Exactly what the D.A. claimed is absolutely false – and I don’t mean false, I mean fraudulent,” Geragos said at a news conference after Wednesday’s downtown court appearance by Brown. “This motion, frankly, was a travesty.”

District attorney’s officials declined to comment.

Brown wore a dark gray jacket and a skinny tie during his brief appearance before Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Brandlin. The judge ordered Brown to report to his probation officer within 48 hours and provide any documentation related to his community service. He also asked the county’s probation department to report to the court about how much labor Brown had done, and scheduled another hearing for April 5.

Brown is on five years probation after pleading guilty to a felony count of assault in connection with a 2009 attack on his girlfriend, singer Rihanna. She accompanied him to court Wednesday and sat in the second row with other Brown supporters. As part of his probation, Brown was required to perform 180 days of community labor in Virginia.

The motion filed Tuesday by Deputy Dist. Atty. Mary A. Murray said an investigation into Brown’s community service found “significant discrepancies indicating at best sloppy documentation and at worst fraudulent reporting,” and asked a judge to order Brown to carry out his court-ordered labor in Los Angeles County instead of Virginia, where he lives.

The filing outlined a series of inconsistencies with a report prepared by Richmond police, and alleged Brown was not in the city — or even the country — during times he reportedly was picking up trash. Among the episodes cited in the motion was that Brown claimed he completed four hours of trash pickup between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. on one day when he was actually on a private plane to Cancun that he boarded at 4 p.m.

Geragos, however, said his client completed the labor by 2 p.m. and was still able to make his flight.

In another instance, the district attorney’s office said Brown claimed he was picking up trash in a Richmond alley while he was actually hosting a charity event about 100 miles away in Washington, D.C. In his motion filed Wednesday, Geragos contended that the district attorney’s office made the accusation without knowing when Brown was in the nation’s capital and when he got back to Richmond, though the lawyer did not detail when Brown carried out the labor.

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— Andrew Blankstein and Kate Mather