Charge Against Ex-Grid Star Dropped

The Los Angeles district attorney’s office Friday declined to file battery charges against former football great Jim Brown, who was arrested in August on suspicion of beating his live-in girlfriend.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Stephen Kay said prosecutors decided not to pursue the case, in part, because the alleged victim, Debra Clark, 21, has refused to cooperate.

Clark originally told officers Brown had beaten her and dragged her on the floor in a jealous rage Aug. 22, saying that he had become angry over her attentions to other men at a health spa where she was employed as a receptionist.

The 5-foot, 1-inch, 90-pound Clark called police, who arrested the 6-foot, 2-inch, 235-pound Brown at his Hollywood Hills home and booked him for investigation of felony battery.

“Three days after the incident,” Kay said, “she (Clark) went to the Hollywood police station and told Detective Jack Luther she did not wish to prosecute Mr. Brown.”

“We just cannot establish what happened without her testimony,” Kay said.

It was not Brown’s first brush with the law. Charges of rape, sexual battery and assault with a deadly weapon made against Brown last year were dropped because of what prosecutors called “inconsistencies” in the testimony of the complaining witness. The former Cleveland Browns star was fined $500 and served a day in jail for a 1978 conviction of beating a golf partner in an argument about placement of a ball on the green.

And misdemeanor charges of battery and disturbing the peace filed against Brown in 1971 were dropped after the two young women who made the allegations failed to testify at his trial.