Michael S. Jeffries, the former chief executive of Abercrombie and Fitch who was charged with running an international sex-trafficking ring, on Friday was found unfit to stand trial because of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
In a three-page order, Judge Nusrat J. Choudhury of the Eastern District of New York, wrote that Mr. Jeffries was “suffering from a mental disease or defect rendering him mentally incompetent.” Judge Choudhury also ordered that Mr. Jeffries be hospitalized for four months to observe whether his condition improves.
The ruling followed a letter filed last month by Mr. Jeffries’s lawyers, Brian H. Bieber and Alek Ubieta. They wrote that, based on the independent evaluation of three doctors, Mr. Jeffries, 80, had severe dementia and Alzheimer’s, which “ensures continued decline over time.” The condition meant Mr. Jeffries could not understand the charges he was facing, his lawyers wrote.
Mr. Jeffries was indicted last October on charges that, from 2008 to 2015, he coerced dozens of men into sex with him, using his position as the clothing retailer’s chief executive to sexually exploit models who were motivated to advance their careers. He had pleaded not guilty.
Working with his romantic partner, Matthew Smith, and a third person, James Jacobson, Mr. Jeffries lured the men to secret sex parties with the possibility that they’d receive modeling jobs, federal prosecutors said. Mr. Smith and Mr. Jacobson have also been charged with sex trafficking, and, like Mr. Jeffries, have pleaded not guilty.
According to prosecutors, the men that Mr. Jeffries and his co-defendants coerced were not allowed to leave the sex parties. Along with being forced into sex, they were made to consume alcohol, drugs and Viagra. The charges echoed claims made in a class-action lawsuit brought against Abercrombie in 2023 and reported on in a BBC investigation.
The defendants “used their money and influence to prey on vulnerable men for their own sexual gratification,” Breon Peace, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District, said in a statement last October.
Though Mr. Jeffries was credited with saving Abercrombie from bankruptcy in the early 1990s, the company faced a variety of crises under his stewardship, well before last year’s criminal indictment.
When Mr. Jeffries left the company in 2014, the company was facing backlash over what many customers saw as its hypersexualized imagery of young models, and it had been enduring sliding sales.
In 2004, Abercrombie agreed to pay $40 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the company of favoring white employees over Black, Hispanic and Asian workers. In 2012, it faced an age-discrimination lawsuit that claimed that employees on Abercrombie’s Gulfstream jet were required to respond to any of Mr. Jeffries’s requests with “no problem.”