NOT PRECEDENTIAL UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT _______________ No. 19-2743 _______________ UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. FREDRICK BROWN, Appellant _______________ On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania (D.C. No. 3:17-cr-00396-001) District Judge: Honorable Malachy E. Mannion _______________ Submitted Under Third Circuit L.A.R. 34.1(a) on April 24, 2020 Before: AMBRO, SHWARTZ, and BIBAS, Circuit Judges (Filed: May 19, 2020) _______________ OPINION* _______________ BIBAS, Circuit Judge. Fredrick Brown was a pimp who used lies to push women and an underage girl into prostitution and violence to keep them in it. A federal jury convicted him of several crimes, including sex trafficking a minor and sex trafficking through force, fraud, or coercion. His * This disposition is not an opinion of the full Court and, under I.O.P. 5.7, is not binding precedent. defense at trial was that his victims were prostitutes by choice, not victims of abuse. The District Court let Brown cross-examine his victims about their other prostitution during the three years charged in the indictment. But it barred him from questioning them about their earlier and later histories of prostitution, relying on Federal Rule of Evidence 412 (often called the rape-shield law). Because the court did not abuse its discretion by excluding this evidence, we will affirm. I. BACKGROUND A. Facts From 2011 to 2014, Brown ran a prostitution ring out of a few hotels in northeastern Pennsylvania. During that time, he met A.B., a 17-year-old homeless runaway from Russia. He took her in and gave her drugs. Soon, he pushed her into prostitution to earn money, but told her that she would be safe only if he was her pimp. She agreed. For more than a year, he set her up with johns whom he knew from his drug dealing. Usually, this happened in local hotels. But sometimes, he drove her to other hotels as far away as New York and Virginia. Brown enticed A.B. into prostitution by falsely promising her lots of money. Though at first he proposed to split her earnings equally, he took most of her share to cover the costs of hotel rooms, food, condoms, and a fee for his protection. To control her, he punched, slapped, pistol-whipped, raped, and pointed his gun at her. One beating was so severe that she had to go to the hospital. A.B. feared that if she disobeyed him, he would kill her. Brown also controlled all her immigration paperwork, so as a noncitizen A.B. worried that she could not leave him. Brown was violent toward his other prostitutes too. 2 Eventually, state and federal investigators learned of Brown’s prostitution ring. By then, he had been sentenced to state prison on DUI and drug charges. A federal grand jury charged him with several crimes, including sex trafficking “by means of . . . force, fraud, or coercion” and trafficking a minor. 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a), (b)(1). B. Procedural history Before trial, the Government expected Brown to argue that his ...
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