This Manhattan lawyer can now pop the Champagne, but he might want to use a paper cup.
A former attorney for American Express was fully acquitted today of serious felony assault charges that could have put him in prison for 25 years — for allegedly gashing another man in the face with a broken Champagne flute during a brawl at the tony Thom Bar last summer.
Jurors cleared Columbia Law School grad Bryan Brooks, 37, after the lawyer testified that it was his much-larger, much-drunker supposed victim who had started the fight. Chaka Smith, a 27-year-old real estate manager, admitted he’d downed 9 or 10 drinks that night. He had needed 50 stitches to close the gash on his face.
“I was scared,” Brooks told the jury. “And I just swung. I was holding the Champagne glass from which I was drinking,” he’d testified. “All I remember was trying to get this big guy off of me.”
Brooks lawyer Eric Seiff told jurors in closing arguments yesterday that Brooks had only swung at Smith in self defense — and that Smith’s injuries could have been caused by all the glass on the floor from a giant ice bucket filled with bottles and glasses that had toppled in the fray.
“You can see on the surveillance video that Mr. Brooks is pushed back [by Smith] again and again,” Seiff said after the verdict. “Smith is 228 pounds, and he is filled with alcohol.” Brooks, who lost his job upon being arrested, declined to comment as he left court.