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.
