Hearings for alleged clients of Boston-area brothel ring will be public, SJC rules

Initial court hearings for the 28 men accused of buying sex from a Greater Boston brothel network will be open to the public, the state’s highest court ruled Thursday.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruling upheld a 2023 decision from Cambridge District Court’s clerk-magistrate, who agreed to make the closed-door hearings public following requests from several news outlets.

“The clerk-magistrate acted reasonably and within the proper scope of her discretion in deciding to grant public access to the show cause hearings, based on her reasonable assessment that the Acting United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts’s announcements regarding the [criminal complaint] applications — which indicated that the accused included unidentified government officials, corporate executives, and others in positions of power, wealth, and responsibility — raised legitimate public concerns about potential favoritism and bias if such hearings were held behind closed doors,” Justice Scott Kafker wrote for the court.

Those concerns, he added, outweighed anonymity interests for the John Does, who fought to keep their show-cause hearings private. 

However, the SJC ruled the Cambridge clerk-magistrate was correct in denying public access to the men’s criminal complaint applications until after their hearings. Specifically, the court found that “disclosure of such applications prior to the show cause hearings posed a risk that extraneous or erroneous information about the accused would be disclosed, without an opportunity for the accused to address or respond to such disclosures, as would be the case at the show cause hearings.” 

None of the alleged brothel customers have been publicly identified. Lawyers for the accused have been pushing for months to keep their hearings closed, arguing their clients’ lives would be “severely and irreparably harmed” if their names became public, even if they were not ultimately charged. 

“Allowing the media to attend these proceedings will undermine their integrity and usurp their purpose, turning a hearing into a searing cauldron of pain — from which any sane person would be desperate to escape,” a lawyer for one of the men wrote in a January court filing. 

But a lawyer for WBUR, The Boston Globe, and NBC10 Boston said otherwise, citing public interest in the case. Boston.com and the Globe share a parent company.  

The alleged brothel customers’ identities have been a great source of speculation since November 2023, when federal authorities busted a “high-end brothel network” purportedly operating out of apartments in the Boston and Washington, D.C., suburbs. Two of the three people charged with running the brothels have pleaded guilty in federal court, and the third is expected to change his plea to guilty next month. 

Acting U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Levy has said the commercial sex ring catered to a “wealthy and well-connected clientele” whose ranks included politicians, military officers, doctors, lawyers, and tech and pharmaceutical executives. In December 2023, Levy’s office announced authorities were seeking state criminal charges against 28 alleged clients. 

Typically held in secret, the show-cause hearings will determine whether there is probable cause to charge the alleged sex buyers. And as Kafker noted in the SJC ruling, citing Levy’s involvement and the significant public interest, “the complaint applications at issue are far from the typical, often minor, matters that are the subject of show cause hearings in the District Court.”

Abby Patkin

Staff Writer

Abby Patkin is a general assignment news reporter whose work touches on public transit, crime, health, and everything in between.

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