Teofil Brank, who performed under the stage name Jarec Wentworth, had thousands of Twitter followers when in early 2015 he posted a cryptic tweet: “How many porn stars know a man named Don? Yes Don.”
At the time, Burns was reeling in a shipyard in Vancouver, Washington, after receiving a series of threatening texts from Brank.
Brank was arrested later at an FBI sting at an El Segundo Starbucks near LAX where he had gone to collect the $1 million and the title to the Audi from an undercover agent posing as Burns’ business associate. Brank had traveled to the meeting with his friend Etienne Yim from San Diego, who had waited in a pickup in the parking lot with a revolver. Fearing a setup, Brank had told Yim to use the gun if anyone shot at them. Yim later surrendered to the authorities after an FBI agent approached him.
At a hearing at the Richard H. Chambers U.S. Court of Appeals in Pasadena on Thursday, Brank’s attorney Ethan Balogh asked the court to acquit Brank, order a new trial or vacate his sentence.
Balogh argued that the government had failed to prove that Brank had committed extortion with his tweet. Instead, he said Burns had offered to pay the escort and porn star to remove the post in exchange for the sports car and $500,000.
Burns testified during the trial that he had feared the tweet would harm his reputation if the post was disseminated more widely on the internet. But Balogh said fear of a damaged reputation was not enough to support the government’s charge of Hobbs Act extortion.
The Hobbs Act prohibits extortion affecting interstate or foreign commerce.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eddie Jauregui argued that extortion under the statute was not limited to fear of physical injury or economic harm, as Balogh asserted.
“Is it your position – it has to be doesn’t it – that you can have wrongful use of actual, threatened force, violence, fear, and that these are three separate things?” asked panel member U.S. District Judge Terrence Berg.
“I don’t think it’s right or fair to focus on one tweet,” Jauregui said. “And I also don’t think it’s correct to minimize the tweets that came before Brank posts this ‘Does anybody know Don’ on Twitter.”
In another text he added: “You promised me you would Let me drive the r8. Cars are my life you know that. Show Im [sic] Nothing to you. Promises broken. I’m feeling evil right now. Disappointed.”
“All of that I think is enough for the jury to say ‘What’s going on here is that he is trying to induce him to part with property,’” Jauregui said.
“This guy had genuine fear. A captain of industry flying prostitutes around to orgies on a plane interstate. That’s some bad news,” Balogh said.
