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<http://nytimes.com>

Freed From Prison by Trump and Now Facing the Prospect of Going Back
Santul Nerkar

April 11, 2025

In the early hours of Feb. 15, Jonathan Braun, a violent felon granted
clemency by President Trump, was agitated.

After getting into a heated argument with his wife and parents and kicking
them out of his cavernous Long Island home, Mr. Braun knocked on the door
of his live-in nanny under the pretext of retrieving his phone, which was charging in her room.

What followed, according to the former nanny's testimony on Friday, was a terrifying, degrading encounter. Mr. Braun, shirtless, entered the room,
pulled her onto her bed and put her into a headlock, she said. Then he
pushed her hand over his bare genitals as he groped her breasts, telling
her he had always wanted to have intercourse with her.

The nanny said she had wrested herself away from his grasp, escaped to her bathroom and locked herself in.

Coming on the second day of a hearing that will determine whether Mr.
Braun returns to federal prison, her testimony offered one of the most
vivid depictions of the depraved behavior he is accused of engaging in.
There were no defense witnesses.

Mr. Trump commuted Mr. Braun's 10-year sentence for drug trafficking at
the end of his first term in office. The commutation came after Mr.
Braun's family used its close ties to the father of Jared Kushner, Mr.
Trump's son-in-law and a senior White House adviser at the time, to secure
Mr. Braun's release.

The move, which was widely condemned by law enforcement officials,
reflected the Trump administration's consolidation of clemency powers
outside the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney to the
White House. The office has been accused of failing to seriously vet
defendants seeking clemency.

Mr. Braun has a long, checkered past with the justice system. In 2009,
federal investigators searched what they said was a stash house for his marijuana smuggling operation. When he learned of the search, Mr. Braun
drove 25 hours from Florida to an Indian reservation on the U.S.-Canada
border, was smuggled into Canada and then fled to Israel.

He returned to the U.S. the next year and was indicted on federal drug
charges. But in the nearly nine years between his indictment and
conviction, he was free on bail, enabling him to get involved in the
predatory lending business, making usurious loans to struggling
small-business owners whom he would threaten with violence.

After being sentenced by Judge Kiyo A. Matsumoto of Federal District Court
in Brooklyn in 2019, Mr. Braun started providing information about the predatory-lending business to federal prosecutors in Manhattan in exchange
for his release from prison. Mr. Trump's last-minute commutation stripped prosecutors of their leverage over him, hampering their investigation.

Once Mr. Braun got out of prison, he went back to loan sharking: He was eventually banned from the cash-advance business by a New York state
judge, and in 2024, a federal judge ordered him to pay a $20 million fine
in a suit brought by the Federal Trade Commission.

On April 4, after Mr. Braun was arrested for a fifth time since his
sentence was commuted, Judge Matsumoto ordered that he be detained. She is
now overseeing a revocation hearing, a proceeding with a lower standard of guilt than the typical criminal trial, to decide whether Mr. Braun should
be sent back to federal prison for violating the commutation's terms.

Over two days this week, witnesses described a troubling pattern of bad behavior by Mr. Braun. Prosecutors also showed videos of Mr. Braun
forcefully kicking and yelling violent threats at a spiritual adviser who
was visiting him, his family and the nanny, and being restrained by
hospital staff members after prosecutors said he swung a pole at nurses
and threatened to kill them.

Mr. Braun is also accused of dodging $160 in bridge tolls in his white Lamborghini and black Ferrari. Raymond Webb, the executive director of the Nassau County Bridge Authority, testified that Mr. Braun had evaded the
tolls 75 times by tailgating cars with E-ZPass tags.

"There was a methodology applied by the evader," Mr. Webb said.

Describing her state of mind on the morning she says Mr. Braun attacked
her, the nanny said she had been "terrified" of what he would do to her if
she opened the door. That, she said, was partly because of how she had
heard him talk to people who owed him money.

After locking herself in the bathroom, the nanny testified, she had
frantically texted her husband, who lives in another country, to tell him
that she feared for her life. Her husband called the police, and the
couple spoke over the phone in low voices so as to not tip off Mr. Braun

While she was in the bathroom, the nanny also sent messages to Mr. Braun's
wife and mother.

"Your son is angry," she wrote to his mother.

About an hour later, police officers arrived.

After the nanny's testimony, Kathryn Wozencroft, Mr. Braun's lawyer, asked Judge Matsumoto to release her client to home confinement so he could
celebrate Passover, including by visiting his temple. Judge Matsumoto
rejected the request, saying that Mr. Braun had been accused of
threatening a fellow congregant during services.

"I am reluctantly going to deny your request for bail," the judge said.
The hearing is set to continue on May 15.

Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.

Santul Nerkar is a Times reporter covering federal courts in Brooklyn.

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