Ah, Legatus!— Almost 200 Pages of Victim Impact Statements — Clare Bronfman Sentencing Likely to Be Pushed Back to April

Things continue to go badly for Clare Bronfman.

Thanks to a letter filed with the court by her attorney seeking a postponement of her sentencing, we learn there are 198 pages of victim impact statements in her Pre-Sentencing Report.

If we hazard a guess and say the average victim impact statement is two pages, that means there are 99 people who saw fit to write the court to declare that Clare Bronfman made them into victims.

She never expected that when she took her plea deal last April.

At the time, the government estimated her sentencing guidelines would be in the range of 21-27 months in prison.

Now, according to at least one source with knowledge of federal sentencing guidelines, it looks like her new, revised sentencing guidelines, as per Probation and Pretrial Services’ Pre-Sentencing Report [PSR], will be in the 4-7 year range.

More than double what the heiress was led to believe was going to be her likely sentence.

The nearly 100 victims – who came out of the woodwork – had a hand no doubt in influencing the new sentencing guidelines estimates.

Poor foolish little Bronfman. The world was her oyster and she sure shucked a lot of shells for that pearl-like man she worshiped.

Almost 100 victims, think of that.

Though she thought she had pleaded guilty to two, relatively innocuous little felonies – cheating illegal alien Sylvie out of her paychecks and helping Keith Raniere use dead Pam Cafrtiz’s American Express card – she is now apparently going to be sentenced based on the crimes she committed against scores of alleged victims for a raft of new crimes.

Poor little dunce. She thought she was going to be sentenced based on only two victims – Sylvie and the estate of Pam Cafritz.

Instead, she has almost 100 people exposing her criminality. And on the day of sentencing – which now looks like it is going to be sometime in April – there may be 100 people filing into the courtroom and, one by one, telling the story of the monster woman, Clare Webb ‘Legatus’ Bronfman.

Let us now take a look at what her lawyer wrote to the judge.

Full letter: Document 841 – Clare Bronfman’s Request For Postponement Of Sentencing (01.24.2020)

Dear Judge Garaufis:

We write to respectfully seek an adjournment of Clare Bronfman’s sentencing date and a corresponding adjustment of the date for submission of defendant’s sentencing memorandum.

…. Ms. Bronfman’s sentencing is currently scheduled for February 14, with her sentencing memorandum due on January 27. Since those dates were set, Your Honor allowed Ms. Bronfman two weeks from the date she receives complete victim statements to file her objections to the initial PSR.[Presentencing Report]….

We received the victim statements from the Government this week, on January 22, and received additional victim statements today, January 24, meaning that our objections to the PSR are due on February 7. The victim statements we received total 198 pages. We intend to file our objections to the PSR with Probation and the Government, as scheduled, no later than February 7.

However…. defendant seeks an adjournment of the remaining sentencing dates … [to]  allow for sufficient time for the ….  defendant to address the allegations in the voluminous victim statements in her sentencing memorandum. Allowing additional time for the parties and Probation to address the factual issues in the PSR will likely result in a more streamlined sentencing process with fewer factual disputes for the Court to resolve…..

The Government and Probation will no doubt need time to review our submission and to respond to these objections….. After receiving objections, the probation officer may meet with the parties to discuss the objections. The probation officer may then investigate further and revise the presentence report as appropriate….

The Probation Office has previously informed us that they anticipate issuing multiple addenda to the PSR in this case. We anticipate that this process will limit the number of issues and objections that need to be raised with the Court in defendant’s sentencing memo, and, significantly, will affect whether (or how many) disputed portions of the Presentence Report or other controverted matters the Court must rule on at sentencing…..

Further, Ms. Bronfman’s lead counsel, Mr. Geragos, is beginning jury selection in a trial in Salt Lake City on Monday, January 27, and the trial is anticipated to last at least eight weeks…. In order for Mr. Geragos to be able to participate in and prepare for Ms. Bronfman’s sentencing, we request that the Court schedule a sentencing date that is after Mr. Geragos’s trial concludes.

Thus, we respectfully seek an adjournment of Ms. Bronfman’s sentencing date to March 30 or later, with defendant’s sentencing memorandum due sufficiently in advance of that date to allow the Court to review it….

Respectfully submitted,
Kathleen E. Cassidy

****

It seems that not only is Mark Geragos on trial through February, but the prosecution’s Tanya Hajjar will start a trial in March, which means it looks like Clare will be sentenced in April.

Here is Hajjar’s letter in response to Bronfman’s letter

Dear Judge Garaufis:

The government respectfully submits this letter in response to the defendant Clare Bronfman’s request for an adjournment of the sentencing date currently scheduled for February 14, 2020. The government was not consulted prior to the defendant’s filing but takes no position on the request for an adjournment of the sentencing hearing in this case.

If the Court is inclined to grant the defendant’s request to adjourn the sentencing hearing, the government respectfully requests that the proceeding be adjourned to a date after March, as the undersigned is scheduled to begin a trial before the Honorable Allyne R. Ross on March 2, 2020.

Respectfully submitted,
Tanya Hajjar
Assistant U.S. Att

***

So 198 pages of victim impact statements are going to take time to rebut. They just recently came in and there are rules on responding and objecting. It goes back and forth between the defendant and the probation department that wrote the Pre-Sentencing Report.

On top of that, you have attorneys on both sides with trials. I predict the judge will consent to the adjournment and Clare will be sentenced in April.

At the bottom of all this is that Clare had possibly the worst legal representation one could imagine.

They led her to take a plea deal with a large fine [$6 million -which she and others thought was the cost of buying down her sentence] and it was the type of plea deal where the judge solely determines the sentence.

There are two kinds of plea deals. The one she got – where the judge decides the sentence based on various considerations [including surprising victim impact statements] and he is only limited to not going beyond the maximum sentence – or the type of plea deal which fixes the sentence in advance, which the judge can accept or reject, but if he accepts it, he is bound by the sentence agreed upon.

Clare went with option number 1 – no fixed sentence.

All she had in her plea deal was an estimate from the prosecution of what they thought the sentencing guidelines would be – 21-27 months.

Guess what? They were wrong. They helped make it wrong too, by going out of their way to contact alleged victims and persuade them to submit victim impact statements. They helped rustle up victims – which, in turn, impacted Clare’s likely sentence.

Or to say it another way, they sweet-talked Clare into taking a plea deal that they said they estimated would be 21-27 months – and got her to pay a fat $6 million fine – thinking no doubt that Clare would think her big fine had bought her a lighter sentence. Then the prosecution went out and did everything in their power to cock up the sentence by getting victims arrayed against her to help persuade the judge that their estimate of 21-27 months was entirely wrong.

And they say there is no such thing as karma.

This is exactly what Clare did to many people with her tricky, below the belt, litigation strategies.

Make a deal – partly by her word [and not signed agreements] then work against the person behind their back to sink them.  Clare was good at ruining people’s happiness.

And some 100 victims are coming forward to prove it.

Still, she has no one to blame but herself.

No one promised her anything. Even the prosecution told her that the 21-27 months was just their “current” estimate. They were honest with her.

That she has more money than brains is not their fault.

And Judge Nicholas Garuafis went out of his way to make it clear that he was not bound to the sentencing guidelines as estimated by the prosecution. He told her he could sentence her to the max sentence which in her case is 25 years if he chose to sentence her to serve her two felonies consecutively.

Clare Bronfman used to have so much fun in court harming others, and destroying people

Now normally, I suppose, plea deals with estimates of sentencing guidelines often work out within the range the feds estimate. But then again not everyone has 100 victims – real victims – real people who really got hurt by this monster – coming out to skew the results.

You can bet that the probation officer who wrote her Pre-Sentencing Report got a real earful of victimization.

And because these are true stories, because they are real victims, real people oppressed and often destroyed by this woman and her conscienceless use of her wealth in the service of her vainglorious master, I know they were persuasive.

Normally, you would not get a sentence much longer than the 21-27 months for the two felonies she pleaded guilty to. But then comes 100 victims – all with heartbreaking stories of how Clare ruined their lives. No longer are there two victims, there are 100.

It is a game-changer.

But it is fair.  The woman is a cruel monster. She has done despicable things to so many people and what makes it worse is that she had a fortune at her disposal which made her ten times more deadly. I know. I am one of her victims.

Still, if she had good legal representation she would not be in this jam, I suspect.

She made the wrong kind of plea bargain. The kind where the judge has the final say and nothing not in writing means a damn thing. Her lawyer ought to have known that. Just because the plea deal suggests 21-27 months does not mean you get 21-27 months.

And by April, she will learn that her plea deal was worthless.

Had she better representation – say had she not attacked Joe O’Hara back in 2005 and kept him as her attorney, he could have advised her of what he himself did – take a plea deal where the sentence is fixed.

In short, just to review, there are two kinds of plea deals. It is all under rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.

Type 1: A plea deal that does not bind the court to a sentence. It is up to the judge.

Type 2: A plea deal where all parties agree that a specific sentence applies. Such a plea deal binds the court once the court accepts the plea agreement.

Of course, had Clare gone for type 2 plea deal, the judge might have rejected the fixed sentence – and if he did that, then Clare would have had to go to trial, alongside her lovely master, Keith Raniere.

It might have gone even worse. She might have lost at trial and been convicted on more charges and had an even longer sentence than what she is likely to get in April.

But the judge might also have accepted a plea deal, say with a fixed maximum of 27 months.

Right now, she looks like she is going to get hit hard.

Karma, or so it appears.

But that’s what you get when you worship the man with the KAR of Karma in his initials.

Still, one can see why someone might want to worship him. One look and you can see why these two were a match made in Hades.

Warning Unpleasant Picture Ahead

Warning More Upsetting Pictures Ahead; Do Not View on Full Stomach

Clare Bronfman did not fare well in her Pre-Sentencing Report.

Frank Parlato