Ex-professor, prostitution suspect dies
She was a former college professor who had lost almost everything – her stellar academic reputation, her financial well-being and her anonymity in the swanky suburban neighborhood where she was accused of working as a high-priced prostitute.
With Brandy Britton’s trial planned to start this week, the former University of Maryland Baltimore County professor apparently took her own life over the weekend, hanging herself in her living room, Howard County, Md., police say. A family member found the body Saturday afternoon. Police say they do not suspect foul play.
It was a grievous end to a life that friends and colleagues say was once filled with remarkable promise and ambition.
Britton, 43, was the first in her family to go to college, double-majoring in biology and sociology. Her first sociology professor, Sheila Cordray, told the Washington Post last year that Britton was “one of the brightest students I’ve ever had.”
But she was facing the world’s toughest truth: She had no idea who she was about to become.
Her trial date on four counts of prostitution was set for Monday. Police would get a chance to air their version of Brandy Britton: that in her $400,000 home at the end of a cul-de-sac, Britton had been working as a prostitute.
She called herself Alexis, police said, and advertised on a Web site that described Alexis as a “quintessential ‘brick house’ ” and “sophisticated, refined, educated and articulate. She has two Bachelor of Science degrees, one in biology and the other in sociology. She also holds a Ph.D. from an elite university.”
In a sting, Howard police sent an undercover officer to her house last January and arrested her.
Britton heatedly denied the allegations, but when the Washington Post asked her last year how she had been supporting herself since leaving UMBC in late 1999 and a subsequent job with the Baltimore public schools, she recommended a book: “Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry.”
Her attorney, Christopher Flohr, has been out of his office taking care of his ailing father and had hoped to postpone her trial date. Flohr’s partner, William Paul Blackford, heard the news of Britton’s death Monday morning when the Post called. He sat in silence for several moments, then spoke of her other recent court battle: foreclosure hearings on her home.
He talked about Britton’s fears that she would lose the house where she had raised two children, now grown, as a single parent and where she had been living with her two potbellied pigs, dog and two cats.
“It’s been a descent for Brandy,” her mother, Victoria Britton, said last year from her home in Oregon. She did not return calls for comment Monday.
Victoria Britton had cheered, she said, when her daughter earned a doctorate in sociology and arrived in the mid-1990s at UMBC, where she received raises and raves from other professors.
But the raves subsided after Brandy Britton filed a $10 million sex discrimination suit against UMBC – one mirroring the suit she had filed against her California employer just before joining UMBC. She left the university at the end of 1999.