Women Who Say a Famous Producer Abused Them Have Spent Years Seeking Justice

At one point, Buch says, she was able to leave the hotel room. She got into her car and pulled it right outside the hotel, before she had to stop.

“I was so exhausted I couldn’t drive,” she told VICE News. “I wanted to drive and I couldn’t. I was so battered and dead. I opened my car door and threw up outside the car.” Then she crawled into the back seat and tried to sleep.

Soon enough, Buch says, the second woman, Detail’s other protégée, came and found her, persuading her to go back to the hotel room. The woman then left to go to an Airbnb where she was staying. That was when the rape occured, Buch says. It was not the first time. (The account Buch gave to VICE News is consistent with both a civil complaint she filed against Detail and a criminal complaint later filed against the producer.)

This time, though, things were different. The next day was Sunday morning—the one day a week Detail usually let her out of his sight, according to Buch. The other woman had left for the Airbnb in Buch’s car. In a miracle of quick thinking, Buch says, she managed to persuade Detail to drive her to her car, telling him she needed to go to her sister’s house.

“It was a spur of the moment thing,” she told VICE News. “I didn’t think he was going to let me. But he said, ‘Fine, go be with your sister.’” Shaking, Buch says, she drove to her sister’s house, where she collapsed, wept, and blocked Detail’s number.

“She took pictures of me,” Buch said of her sister, meaning pictures of her injuries. “And we went to the police the next day. The day after I left, I finally felt like myself again. I could feel my own energy coming back.”

Kristina Buch is now 22, and with only intermittent public attention, she and several other women have been fighting a long and bizarre legal battle against Detail, who they say abused them, controlled them, and committed numerous acts of sexual violence against them. The accusations span a considerable length of time: One of the women has alleged in court documents that Detail drugged and raped her close to 10 years ago, but that the police did nothing until just months ago.

“The police came,” Shawn Holley, a high-profile attorney best known for her work on O.J. Simpson’s defense team who now represents the woman, told VICE News. “And then they proceeded, for reasons I don’t understand, to do nothing until nine years later, when a detective came to her door apologizing.”

Many of the women were aspiring young singers or otherwise involved in the music business; Detail, whose legal name is Noel Fisher, was an established and well-known producer who’d worked with the likes of Beyoncé, Future, and Lil Wayne. His work on “Drunk in Love” won him a Grammy. And he promised, the women have said in court documents, to launch their careers, too.

Detail’s attorney, Jaaye Person-Lynn, told VICE News, “I don’t believe any rapes occurred, talking to my client.” He added, “I understand buyer’s remorse. If a woman has sex with a man she doesn’t want to, that doesn’t mean she didn’t consent in the moment. Just because she may wake up the next day feeling bad about herself, feeling embarrassed, that doesn’t mean it was a rape. Even if you don’t want to, that doesn’t mean you don’t consent. The same way some of my clients don’t want to plead guilty, but consent to plead guilty.”

He also claimed that the allegations are the result of a coordinated effort among the complainants in the criminal case, stating that Detail’s accusers were “trying to make it in this industry.”

“When things don’t go their way, one of the young women started rounding up other women saying, ‘This happened to me, let’s get together and get him,’” Person-Lynn said. “That’s the basis on why I don’t think it was rapes in these situations.”

Detail’s most recent civil attorney, Muammar Reed, declined to comment, and someone who answered the phone at Reed’s office said the attorney is “trying to withdraw” as the attorney of record in an ongoing civil case. In addition, someone describing himself as a representative of Detail called VICE News to discuss the story and the allegations, but ultimately did not give a statement on the record.

The oldest allegation on record is the case from 10 years ago; a woman who was at the time working as a music publicist alleged in a civil lawsuit that she was invited to a small gathering at Detail’s home in October of 2010, which she attended with a friend. Detail poured her a drink, the woman said in her complaint, and immediately began to feel unwell. (The woman is identified in the complaint as Jane Doe.)

“Approximately ten minutes after drinking a small amount from the glass given to her by Detail, Doe began to feel woozy and like she could no longer speak,” the suit said. Once the other people at the gathering left the room and they were alone, it added, “Detail forcibly took Doe down a set of stairs in his home to a dungeon-type room in his basement. This dungeon-type room was mostly empty, but contained a bed with a worn out mattress.” Once there, the suit alleges, Detail raped her both vaginally and anally, an attack that was only interrupted when her friend heard her cries for help and banged on the door.

The woman said in her complaint that she went to the hospital the following day, underwent a sexual assault forensic exam, and spoke to police. “Doe made a statement to the police but felt that they were uninterested and not listening to her,” the suit said. “After making her report to the authorities, Doe regularly followed up with law enforcement to check if Detail was being investigated. However, her calls and messages went unanswered, and eventually she became dejected and stopped calling.”

“She changed her life completely,” Holley, her attorney, told VICE News. She went from being a music publicist to working as a truck driver. Holley filed the civil suit on her behalf in mid-September; she’s also a complainant in the criminal lawsuit.

Three other women—Kristina Buch, Isabella Mack, and Janae Knox— who say Detail raped and abused them all also separately sued in civil court between 2018 and 2019. Each ultimately won a sizable judgment against him, in Buch’s case after he simply failed to show up or respond to the suit in any way. Buch’s was the largest: She was awarded $15 million in September of 2019.

Long after Buch’s judgment was won, Detail has resurfaced, demanding the case be reopened and claiming he had no knowledge of it at all. He has also claimed in court filings that restraining orders sought by Buch and another woman damaged his career, smearing his name and making it virtually impossible for him to work, as well as damaging his psyche so much he became homeless. (Buch’s lawyers have argued that his claim that he knew about the restraining orders, but somehow failed to learn about the lawsuits, strains credulity.) In court filings, Detail has also denied the assault allegations, writing that he has been “wrongly and falsely” accused of physical and sexual abuse, and that those allegations have taken a toll on both his career and his mental health.

“It’s unusual for someone to not respond,” said Genie Harrison, a prominent attorney in sexual harassment cases who represented Knox and Mack. (Through Harrison, both women didn’t respond to requests to be interviewed). “For someone to pretend like it’s not happening.” In Knox and Mack’s cases, she said, “He was ignoring it and the cases, and then coming in and making excuses. It’s pathetic, really.”

Recently, the case has finally spilled over into the criminal realm. After a long and balky investigation by the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and L.A. District Attorney’s office, Detail was arrested on August 5 and charged with sexual abuse against six women, named by their initials in court documents. He remains in custody, with bail set at $6.2 million. One of those women is Buch, and another is the Jane Doe from 10 years ago; to her knowledge, Genie Harrison said, neither Mack or Knox are among the victims listed in the criminal case. In all, Detail is charged with 15 counts of sexual assault and five additional counts of felony assault.

On September 16, Detail pleaded not guilty. His next court date is October 20, when a bail review will be scheduled. In a statement issued after his arrest, the Special Victims Bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said they’re still looking for more victims, writing,  “Based on the nature of the allegations, Special Victims Bureau detectives believe there may be additional potential victims and they are seeking the public’s help in identifying any such victims.”

While Buch says she’s grateful and relieved that Detail has finally been charged, she has lingering questions about why it took more than two years after she went to the police. She filed the police report detailing rape, abuse, and being held in that hotel room against her will in May 2018, and then—for over a year—she says she heard virtually nothing. She waited so long that her attorney advised her to file a civil suit, and then longer still, until, she says, Detail ultimately violated a restraining order against her. She only heard from investigators again, she says, after she’d won her civil case. (The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department declined to comment beyond a press release they issued about Detail’s arrest; the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office declined to comment beyond noting that they’ve identified several additional possible victims after filing charges against Detail.)

“We had to push so hard,” Buch said, wearily.

Before that, though, as the Me Too movement unfolded in 2016, 2017, and 2018, so did Detail’s alleged abuse and exploitation. What was happening in the broader culture, according to Buch, didn’t touch the studios where the two worked, in a relationship that she says quickly veered from professional to violent.

“I looked up his name and saw he was a Grammy-winning producer working with all my favorite artists,” Buch said. So she did what most people would have: She went to his studio and started recording songs, which both she and Detail thought were strong. “From then on, he started being like, ‘This is it, you’re a star.’ I met his manager with Cash Money Records. We drew up contracts. That made it all real for me.” So did the fact that Detail started reaching out to her parents back in Indiana, telling them about his plans to make Buch famous.

“I felt like this was it,” Buch said. “This is what I’m supposed to do.”

Music is a field where people can rocket from obscurity to fame virtually overnight, and where one person—the right producer, the right manager—can make or break someone. Because of those things, and because there’s often a significant power and age imbalance between the singer and protégée, it’s ripe for abuse.

“The EEOC did a report about workplace sex harassment and one of the things they identified as places that are likely to have workplace sex harassment problems are places with big power differentials and high-value employees,” said Sharyn Tejani. She’s the executive director of the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund, founded in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein’s outing as a serial sexual predator to offer legal and public relations help to victims of sexual harassment and abuse at work. “No one will discipline this person.”

Time's Up provided what they call “PR support” in Buch’s case, a PR person named Shayna Englin, who reached out to VICE News on Buch’s behalf, and who was present for our interviews. (Englin didn’t intervene in the reporting process in any way, and Buch confirmed privately that she was comfortable having her present.)

Though there’s a perception that the MeToo movement has begun winding down or losing steam, Tejani says that the number of people seeking help from Time's Up has barely slowed, even with the COVID-19 pandemic. They’re currently providing legal support in 257 cases and public relations in 90.

Throughout the last two years, Tejani says, entertainment has been one of the more common fields in which people seek their help. Many are young women, which isn’t surprising, due both to the demographics of the entertainment industry and the realities of abuse. “One of the other places that the EEOC says it’s common to have sex harassment is [where there are] young workers,” Tejani said. “That’s especially upsetting; when you think about it, you’re setting people’s expectations about what’s supposed to happen at work. There’s a lot in the restaurant industry, which is many people’s first job. And so then your next job you think this is how it’s supposed to be. Nobody stopped it when you’re 17 and you think it’s normal in your next job at 25.”

When they first started working together, Buch says, Detail attempted to be “flirty,” but she briskly shut it down. “I was like, ‘No, it’s not going to be like that.’” Soon, his attempts at control and manipulation, she says, came out in other ways. He’d talk and talk at her for hours, blocking her attempts to say anything in response. He demanded that she dye her hair blue; soon after, she had a big modeling job and needed to dye it back to blonde, but he wouldn’t let her, Buch says, telling her that if she was serious about music, she’d drop the modeling.

“He made me wait so long to get a hair appointment,” Buch said, that it was too late. She told her agency she wanted to focus on music instead.

None of this struck Buch as necessarily unusual. That’s both because she was young and new to the industry, and because, to some extent, it’s not. An impresario and his protégée don’t have an exactly normal employee/employer relationship, and producers and agents make demands of clients in the entertainment business that would be outrageous in other contexts—asking, for instance, that they gain or lose weight, dye their hair, or make some other alteration to their image or appearance. It is, in other words, inherently a somewhat controlling relationship, and one that can be ripe for abuse or exploitation.

But there was also an early incident of alleged abuse in September 2017, which Buch to this day remains uncomfortable discussing. She will say that it happened in Miami, when Detail took her to work at Lil Wayne’s studio.

“All my biggest, wildest dreams were coming true,” Buch said, before Detail crossed a physical boundary. She declines to specify what precisely occurred, but says it left her feeling horrified and stuck with no good options. She was in Miami with no way to get back to LA without him. “I also felt like if I let someone know this happened now, then I’m a joke,” she said. So instead, she resolved to block it out, push it down, and hope it never happened again: “I was like, this didn’t happen.” She managed to “block out” the incident almost completely for almost two years, she said.

In September of that year, Buch says, another sexual assault occurred; as Buch remembers it, Detail came in, appearing to be on drugs, and woke her out of a dead sleep. “Since I left this whole situation, I’m still so freaked out when I get woken up out of my sleep. I get angry. I’m startled super easily.”

Throughout the rest of the year and into 2018, Buch says, “it started happening more often.” (In court filings, Buch’s lawyers as well as prosecutors for the LA District Attorney’s office allege that Detail raped her multiple times.) It wasn’t just sexual violence, she says. “He started drinking in that time, and it really started increasing in inappropriateness, in manipulation, in crazy experiences I had with him.”

Buch remembers Detail having her fly to a studio in Detroit, then getting inexplicably angry when she arrived. “I got there and he was like, ‘Man, you ain’t doing shit for me, you ain’t making me no money, why are you out here?'” He then called her mother, Buch says, and told her to get her daughter a ticket home.

Buch’s mother complied, and an assistant drove Buch to the airport. She says she curbside checked her bag, then looked in her wallet to find that her ID and credit card were missing. “I had to go back to the hotel,” she said, where she found her credit card in a pair of pants she’d left, but not her ID. As she searched the room, Detail took the credit card, she said. “He was holding onto it. He said, ‘You don’t need to go on this flight, you should stay here. I have a photo shoot for you you’ll make some money on.” Then, Buch says, he took her phone. She wasn’t able to call her mother, and her bag was in the sky without her. Detail called her mother and said, as Buch remembers it, "She needs to stay here, she’s fine.” Days later, she still couldn’t find her ID. When she told Detail, she says, “He takes it out of his wallet and gives it to me.” She was speechless.

“Every day was a journey,” she said. “Every single day was fucking crazy.”

Detail had also begun calling Buch’s parents frequently. Her mother, who asked that her name not be used to protect her and her husband’s privacy, said that at first, she viewed Detail as an almost paternal figure.

“In the beginning, we weren’t at all concerned,” she said. “I actually thought he was there and looking out for my daughters.”

Buch’s mother says, though, that she found his communications bizarre and frequently struggled to understand him. “He’d call and keep me up late at night and I would take notes trying to decipher it,” she told VICE News, page after page of notes on legal pads.

Detail, Buch’s mother said, “talked like somebody who writes. A lot of it was very difficult to understand, but I listened to everything because he was with my daughter and I wanted to know what was going on. A lot of talking about protecting the investment, protecting Kristina, making sure she was with him all the time.”

Buch’s mother said she was concerned by how difficult it was to decipher what Detail was saying. “I was always concerned because he was so out there and much different than anybody I’d ever met,” she said. She says she contacted Buch’s music attorney to ask, in her words, “Is this normal?”

The attorney reassured her, she said. “She said the industry was like a foreign country and their level of professionalism wasn't the level we were used to, their ways of communicating.” (The attorney didn’t respond to a phone call requesting comment.)

Another of Buch’s family members was struggling at the time with a drug problem that would ultimately result in them going to rehab, and Detail involved himself in that too, telling Buch’s mother that to keep her from going down the same road, Buch needed to get out of the apartment where she lived in West Hollywood and move closer to him in Santa Clarita, a city north of Los Angeles. He promised to take over the rent payments on the West Hollywood apartment, Buch and her mother say, but didn’t do so consistently, and was “mad about it” when he did pay, Buch’s mother said. “It was a very stressful time for our family and my husband and I.” It became part of a larger dispute about what Detail called “Kristina’s budget,” her mother says—the amount of money they all needed to pitch in to make her a star.

“The whole summer was about Kristina’s budget,” Buch’s mother said. ”He said we should look at this like a college education,” and complained that "he was the only one putting money in it,” in her words. He also told her, she said, “Nobody is in the business of saving lives like me, and it doesn’t pay well.”

“Looking back at the conversations, he always thought he could have me on his side,” Buch’s mother added. At one point, he tried to convince her, she said, that Buch also had a drug problem, something her mother knew logically was simply not true. “I was like, ‘I don’t think so.’ I didn’t believe all the things he was telling me, but he still put doubts in my head.”

Buch’s mother said they were ultimately able to end the lease on the apartment in West Hollywood, but became increasingly concerned about Buch’s relationship with Detail, sensing that something wasn’t right. Buch never disclosed the physical abuse to them, she said: “I couldn’t come to terms with it myself.”

“I had no idea the depth of the problem,” Buch’s mother told VICE News. “I thought well, you know—I never imagined everything that took place.”

Since she was able to extricate herself, Buch’s mother said, “I’ve told Kristina many times, maybe it was meant to be. Maybe we can help somebody somehow so they don’t get in the same situation. It can happen to a normal family.”

Throughout their time together, Detail seemed aware of some of the currents of the Me Too movement swirling around the entertainment industry, and seemed to become concerned that it might someday impact him too, Buch says. According to her, he made frequent references in her presence to the lawsuit Kesha was then pursuing against her producer, Dr. Luke, saying suits like that would cause someone to be permanently blackballed from the music industry. (Kesha’s lawsuit against Dr. Luke became a drawn out and exceedingly complex affair. Her original case was dismissed, and Dr. Luke is now suing her for defamation and breach of contract.) The remarks usually weren’t directed to her, but to someone else in the room.

“If you have a lawsuit out,” he said, according to her, “nobody’s going to work with you.”

She took those remarks as veiled threats to stay quiet.

In 2019, the Associated Press wrote extensively about the allegations, to date, against Detail; in statements to the outlet, both Knox and Mack called for him to be held accountable.

"I also hope that other music industry victims come forward because it is time to expose the system that enables men to abuse women in this business,” Mack told the AP in her statement.

Knox and Mack say in court documents that they’ve never received any of what they’re owed. Through Harrison, they are seeking ways to recover the money. “There are ways to enforce judgments,” Genie Harrison, their attorney, told VICE News, “and we’re pursuing that.”

Court documents show that Buch has been paid a fraction of the overall judgment she won, slightly less than $1 million. Before he was taken into custody, some of Detail’s civil attorneys were fighting an attempt by Buch’s attorney to retroactively add Detail Music LLC to the lawsuit, saying it is legally separate from the man himself and that it would be inappropriate to pay the rest of the judgment using funds belonging to the LLC.

Another of Detail’s alleged victims declined to comment when approached by VICE News, saying she wouldn’t consent to an interview unless she was paid for her time.

“It depends on if there is compensation involved or not,” the woman wrote. “If there is I would be happy to. I have had a rough time financially from this situation so I am just trying to use my energy and time wisely.” The woman also asked that her name not be used, writing, “I never wanted my name or any details to be publicized and have been trying since then to rebuild my life. Thank you for your understanding. “

VICE News declined to pay the woman; offering money or any other compensation to an interview subject is widely considered unethical. The woman responded, “You will be profiting from the story, and I have done nothing but suffer financially.”

What followed was, as promised, a long silence. In May 2018, Buch and another woman finally took action in civil court. They filed for emergency protective orders against Detail, accusing him of rape. In response, several other prominent musicians tweeted about their own experiences with him. The singer Bebe Rexha tweeted (and cross-posted to Instagram) “Glad these women came out. It’s scary. He tried to with me, but I literally ran out of that studio. Karma is a bitch.” The singer Tinashe responded to Rexha’s Instagram post, writing in a comment, “The only session I’ve been in to this day where I left due to being soooo uncomfortable. Glad he’s being exposed for the fucking creep he is.”

Meanwhile, the young Canadian singer Jessie Reyez wrote on Twitter, “One night, over 6 years ago Noel ‘Detail’ Fisher tried this on me. I was lucky and I got out before it got to this," she wrote on Twitter. "I didn’t know what to say or who to tell. I was scared. Fear is a real thing. The girls that came out are brave as hell." She also revealed that a hit song, "Gatekeeper," was about him. “Oh, I'm the gatekeeper/Spread your legs/Open up,” one verse of the song goes. “You could be famous/If you come up anywhere else, I'll erase you.” (Rexha, Reyez, and Tinashe didn’t respond to requests for comment through their PR representatives.)

Responding to these allegations, Detail’s civil attorney at the time wrote in a court filing, “Several news outlets and websites, including, but not limited to, TMZ and Rolling Stone, picked up this story and wrote about Mr. Fisher. Additionally, a few music artists with huge followings on Twitter shared and posted links to these stories for their millions of followers to see and this further damaged his character and reputation.”

After successfully getting a restraining order, Buch said, it became obvious that the next step would be to file a civil suit, because the criminal investigation didn’t appear to be going anywhere.

“I didn’t hear anything for the longest time,” she said. “That happened for almost a year. I would keep asking. It was coming up on the statute of limitations for the first rape.”

“We became increasingly concerned with how slow the criminal investigation appeared to be going,” Buch’s lawyer, William Briggs, told VICE News. “I say that because i’ve been involved in a number of high-profile civil and criminal matters. I’ve represented a bunch of folks in the entertainment industry.” He knew, he added, how fast things could move when there was a motivation to do so.

“My lawyer helped discuss with me what our best interests would be,” Buch said. “To my knowledge it was to pursue him in a civil lawsuit, because that was the only way we could get the justice system to push the case.”

Pursuing a sexual abuser in civil court, though, is a complex decision. The vast majority of cases that Time's Up handles are in civil court, because that’s where most workplace harassment comes up, but these cases have pitfalls of their own. Often, filing a suit requires breaking nondisclosure agreements that accusers are forced to sign. It can open up survivors to accusations that they’re trying to make money from the allegations. And the process can be as harrowing as any criminal trial, without the vindication or closure.

Louisette Geiss, a former actor and screenwriter, is one of more than 100 women involved in a class action against both Harvey Weinstein and The Weinstein Company. Geiss says Weinstein invited her to a purported business meeting in a hotel in 2008, where he emerged in an open robe and told Geiss that he would help her career if she watched him masturbate.

The statute of limitations had run out in Geiss’ case and so she couldn't pursue a criminal charge. The class action “was our only way,” Geiss said. “If money is power, and you can take the money away, then it at least dilutes the power and gives it back to us as women.” They also hoped to hold the directors of the Weinstein Company accountable for allegedly turning a blind eye to Weinstein’s abuse for so many years. “We wanted to say, ‘If you support a perpetrator like this it’s going to cost you more money and time than to keep them onboard.’”

But in a surprising July decision, a federal judge upended the proposed $25 million settlement for Geiss and the other women, saying he wasn’t convinced the women met the legal definition for a class action, and suggesting they pursue individual lawsuits.

It was a huge setback, and for Geiss, another bitter reminder of what Weinstein took from her. “I got out of the business because of Harvey,” Geiss said. While it wasn’t her only experience of harassment in the entertainment industry, “He was my last ‘I can’t take it anymore.’”

“My career went quickly tumbling and I hit rock bottom overnight when in May 2018 two aspiring musicians who I mentored, wrongfully and falsely accused me of physical and sexual abuse and filed restraining orders against me,” Detail wrote in a declaration. “The allegations in May 2018 ruined my career and took a toll on me mentally, emotionally, and financially. Record labels and artists stopped working with me after the allegations surfaced in May 2018.”

Detail also said in the declaration that he never intended to evade a complaint informing him of Buch’s case against him, something Buch’s legal team has accused him of doing. (A process server alleged that he was able to serve Detail with court documents, but that Detail denied being Detail while being served.) Instead, he said, he was never made aware of the suit because he was evicted during the proceedings and quickly became homeless.

“I did leave Los Angeles for certain periods of time to get away from all the chatter concerning the allegations,” he stated. Beginning in June 2018 and through the rest of the year, he wrote, “I was homeless and sleeping either behind a warehouse in the Castaic Lake area or on a couch in the living room of anyone who would let him [sic] stay in various places.”

Detail asked that the judgment in the Buch case be set aside. Buch’s lawyers were still fighting this when the criminal case against him was filed and he was taken into custody in August.

Detail’s attorney Jaaye Person-Lynn alleged to VICE News that some of the complainants in the criminal case were involved in a supposed break-in at Detail’s home.

“They went to his home. Stole some things from his home,” he said. (Responding to the allegations of a break-in or coordination among Detail’s abusers, Buch replied, “Absolutely not.”)

Person-Lynn also told VICE News that the allegations as a whole should be viewed in the context of the way sexual assault allegations have been weaponized against Black men.

“This is America,” he said. “White women, as oppressed as they’ve been from white men, they’ve always understood their power when it comes to black men and sexual advances, and how much power they have by saying, ‘This black man, who in the mind of America is a sexual predator anyway, did something to me.’ Towns have been burned down. That’s what the movie Rosewood was about. That’s what Emmett Till got slaughtered for. That history is well documented. I think this falls in line with that.”

“My client is a Black woman,” says Shawn Holley, an attorney for the woman who says Detail raped her 10 years ago. “The Emmett Till metaphor doesn’t carry much weight.” (Buch is white; the ethnicity or race of the other complainants has not been made public.)

William Briggs, Buch’s attorney, told VICE News that he found the Till comparison objectionable. “I am personally offended as a Black man that Mr. Person-Lynn would equate his client, Noel Fisher, who has been credibly accused by multiple women of rape, with Emmett Till,” he wrote in an email. “Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy who was accused of flirting with a white woman and he was subsequently lynched.  Noel Fisher is a 41-year-old man with a history of abusing women—Black, white, and other races—who has been arrested and charged after years of accusations and investigation.  There simply is no comparison between Fisher and Emmett Till, except perhaps in the mind of someone delusional or attempting to deflect from the facts and evidence with reckless race-baiting.”

Lacey has faced criticism in the past for how her office handles sexual misconduct allegations, as well as, more generally, criminal accusations against powerful people. She’s been accused by activists and her opponent in the DA’s race, George Gascón, the former district attorney of San Francisco, of moving particularly slowly when the accused is rich or powerful.

One particularly fraught example in Los Angeles is the case of Ed Buck, a man who’s been widely but wrongly identified as a “megadonor,” who’s now facing nine felony counts from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Central District of California after two men died at his home over the last several years of methamphetamine overdoses. Relatives of the deceased men have accused Buck of preying on Black gay men with impunity. The L.A. Sentinel, a Black-owned newspaper, has accused Lacey of failing Buck’s alleged victims, writing, “Her failure was a direct result of a lack of interest and political will.”

In the case of Harvey Weinstein, activists and Gascón accused Lacey of only filing charges shortly before the primary election in which the pair would face off, in March of this year. (Lacey’s office has denied being too slow to move on Weinstein charges, saying at a press conference, “It was very challenging to get those victims to open up and tell us what they needed to tell us.").

Along with Detail, Lacey’s office is now pursuing an increasingly aggressive prosecution of porn star Ron Jeremy, filing 20 new charges against him at the end of August. In response to a request for comment from VICE News about why the Detail case took so long to investigate, Lacey’s office said, “Since the defendant’s arrest, several women have since come forward and made sexual misconduct allegations against him. Those complaints are under investigation. We decline further comment because it’s a pending case.”

Meanwhile, Detail’s most famous associates have had little to say about him publicly. Representatives for Future, Lil Wayne, and Beyoncé didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“It’s very easy to speak out against people with whom we don’t have personal relationships,” Harrison, the attorney for two of Detail’s alleged victims, says. “It’s very difficult to speak out against people perhaps with whom one does have a personal relationship. The reality is that Detail was allegedly engaging in this behavior prolifically and over extended periods of time. Maybe those with whom he worked knew or didn’t know. I don't know. I don’t have a personal opinion. But it certainly is a deafening silence.”

The second time the family heard from him was in February, Buch and her mother say, not long after she’d won her default judgment.

“Happy holiday to you and your wife and children. I wanted to tell you that i miss all of y’all as a family. And as a family please forgive me for anything I did wrong that led us to separating. I really cared for you all then and still do now.”

In March of this year, Buch says, she ran into Detail in a CVS, where, in violation of the restraining order, he approached her and spoke to her.

“He came up to me and pulled his mask down,” she said. “And said, ‘Kristina, it doesn’t have to be like this. We can talk about this. I'm not mad at you, everything happens for a reason, I still love and care about you.’” Buch says she immediately left the store, got in her boyfriend’s car, and drove off.

Now that those criminal charges have finally been filed, Buch is feeling a mixture of relief—“I’m glad I’m finally getting justice”—and some other, murkier emotions, she tells VICE News.

“It’s a whole new chapter again that I have to be ready for,” she said. “To prepare myself for this whole new thing.” The process wasn’t painful, exactly, but deeply wearying, she said. "It’s really personal to keep reliving it all.”

Buch has been working intensively in therapy, cooking, and spending time with her sister. She’s also doing some college coursework online: psychology, English, and music. “Music is easy,” she said recently, laughing.

For many people, sexual abuse can be the end of trying to pursue a career in their chosen field. Buch is determined that that won’t be her. “I’m still modeling and trying to do music,” she said. “I’ve been working some and working on releasing a single soon.”

Buch’s mother, who’s attended a handful of business meetings with her daughter, says she’s been struck by the difference in the experience she’s had with music industry people post-Detail. “It’s been so different. I didn’t walk away confused like I often did with Detail.” She’s relieved that Buch isn’t “in some studio all night long,” as she puts it, but added, “I’m very leery of the music industry and always will be.”

“He told me so many times I wouldn’t be shit without him,” Buch said recently. “But I’m like, ‘Yes, I am.’ I can do this without you.”

If you need someone to talk to about an experience with sexual assault or abuse, you can call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673), where trained staff can provide you with support, information, advice, or a referral. You can also access 24/7 help online by visiting online.rainn.org.