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Joseph Brooks, Academy Award-Winner And Accused Sexual Assaulter, Commits Suicide
By
Garth Johnston
Published May 22, 2011
Modified May 22, 2011
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By
Garth Johnston
Published May 22, 2011
Modified May 22, 2011
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Joseph Brooks, the 73-year-old Academy Award-winning songwriter accused of sexually assaulting dozens of women, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment on Sunday, police said. Brooks was found with a plastic dry-cleaning bag around his head and a towel wrapped around his neck, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. A hose attached to a helium tank was hooked up to the bag.
It is unclear how long Brooks—whose 25-year-old son Nicholas Brooks is accused of killing the designer Sylvie Cachay in Soho House last December—had been dead for. He was discovered today when he failed to show up for a planned lunch with a friend. A suicide note was found with his body, but police are not currently revealing its contents.
Brooks won the Academy Award for best original song for the 1977 ballad "You LIght Up My Life" from the movie of the same name which he also directed. The song also won Debbie Boone a Grammy for Best New Artist. In 2005 he was behind the remarkably bad 2005 Broadway flop In My Life, which dealt with a musician with Tourette's syndrome and a Village Voice editor with obsessive compulsive disorder who meet cute at a grocery store thanks to a bored deity "and begin an unlikely romance that proves that life's greatest affliction is the one they share—true love."
In 2009 Brooks pleaded not guilty to rape, sexual abuse and other charges in attacks on 11 women who he would lure into his apartment with online ads offering auditions for movie and theater roles, though prosecutors believe he had been attacking women for many years. Brooks would allegedly have his victims drink drugged wine as part of an "acting exercise."
For a longer look at the twisted Brooks family, we'd recommend starting with the profile New York ran earlier this year.
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