Braden Peters, 20, better known as the "looksmaxxing" influencer "Clavicular," walked up to court with a barking dog ahead of his arraignment in a Massachusetts courtroom on Thursday.
Peters appeared in Orleans District Court and entered a not guilty plea on charges relating to an alleged rape. A court clerk confirmed to Fox News Digital that he posted $10,000 bail relating to the charges.
The incident allegedly involved a 17-year-old victim that occurred in 2025 at his family's Cape Cod home.
Former criminal defense attorney and Fox News Contributor Ted Williams said Peters arriving at court with a dog was not necessarily unusual.
"I don't think it's really out of the ordinary for a defendant to show up at court and the dog is left outside on a leash at a specific location or left with a person," Williams told Fox News Digital.
Williams said the dog could have served as a source of support for Peters ahead of the court appearance.
"There are people who are more attached to their dog than they are attached to a human being, believe it or not, and that may be just his support mechanism — the dog," Williams said.
What would be unusual, Williams said, is if the animal were allowed inside the courthouse under normal circumstances — as dogs or animals of any sort are not permitted in courts, he said.
Peters has amassed more than 1 million followers on his Instagram account and is known for rating people's looks via livestream and providing "advice" like surgery and personal training.
In this specific case, Fox News Digital previously reported the teenage victim told investigators she messaged Peters online looking to connect and make content – to which he allegedly sent for an Uber to pick her up and bring her to his house.
On Wednesday, Peters’ attorneys filed a memorandum asking the court to release him on cash bail, arguing he was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community and offering to surrender his passport and have no contact with the alleged victim.
He was not jailed awaiting Thursday’s arraignment; he appeared in response to a summons and then posted bail.
READ IT: Braden Peters’ defense memorandum for his release.
He went on to say, "The fact that these allegations first arose in June 2026 when the complainant and her Florida attorney appeared together at the Chatham Police Department just days before filing an amended civil lawsuit seeking thousands of dollars from Mr. Peters speaks for itself."
This is not Peters' first run-in with the law. He was previously arrested in Florida on battery charges in Kissimmee after a reported fight between two women at an Airbnb property.
The Cape & Islands District Attorney's Office in Massachusetts did not provide a comment to Fox News Digital on Thursday's court proceeding, citing the pending case.
The social media personality denies allegations he gave a girl alcohol until she was drunk and sexually assaulted her
The “looksmaxxing” livestreamer Braden Peters, better known by his stage name Clavicular, pleaded not guilty Thursday to charges that he raped a 17-year-old girl at his family’s Massachusetts home.
A social media personality known for promoting extreme devotion to male beauty, Peters, 20, is accused of giving the girl alcohol until she was drunk and then sexually assaulting her when she visited him in Chatham, on Cape Cod, in May 2025.
The lone holdout juror who was the only one in favor of convicting her of murder for the strangling deaths of her three young children will not have to have his phone examined or face an inquiry from her defense attorney, a Massachusetts judge ruled Wednesday.
Judge William Sullivan denied Clancy attorney Kevin Reddington's motion for an evidentiary hearing.
Sullivan wrote that the potential evidence to dismiss the juror, referred to as Juror Doe in court documents but understood to be Michael Desronvil, came to light only after the mistrial was declared â which makes it irrelevant under court precedent.
The defense did not raise the issue that Juror Doe lied on the jury questionnaire before the mistrial was declared, he wrote â it originated in media reports.
"Because post-trial information potentially affecting Juror Doe's impartiality cannot be used to attack the determination that a mistrial was manifestly necessary, Clancy is not entitled to an evidentiary hearing on that issue," Sullivan found, while also noting that Reddington didn't raise the possibility that Juror Doe used a cell phone improperly until after the mistrial was declared.
Any further inquiry into the holdout juror is inappropriate because of "the mandate that the court must not delve into a juror's subjective reasoning, thought process, view of the case, or relationship to the other jurors, and must not inquire into the jury's deliberative content, collective thought process, or any disagreement among the jury," Sullivan wrote.
Read the judge's order:
Desronvil told Fox News' Kayleigh McEnany last week that he stands by his decision not to compromise with 11 others who wanted her to be found not criminally responsible due to postpartum psychosis.
He also denied lying under oath on his juror questionnaire, said jurors only used their cellphones during breaks from deliberations and denied claims from other jurors that he'd ignored reasonable doubts about the case.
Reddington has asked the court to preserve juror records from all 12 panelists and six alternates, including their questionnaires, courthouse hallway surveillance video taken outside the deliberation room and sign-in sheets for the jurors' cellphones.
Kennedy taught in New York public schools and advocated for disability rights after suffering severe spinal cord injury
Kyle Kennedy, the granddaughter of Robert F Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy, has died at the age of 42.
Kyle, the daughter of Michael Kennedy, who died in 1997, and Victoria Gifford Kennedy, “passed away peacefully” on 21 September at her home in Westwood, Massachusetts, according to her obituary published by Burke Funeral Homes.
Happy Tuesday, and welcome to another edition of Rent Free. This week, we're going to jump right into it with a philosophical question: What is an accessory dwelling unit anyway?
It's a question that officials in Somerville, Massachusetts, are realizing they didn't know the answer to after learning that a state law allowing ADUs in single-family neighborhoods could also require them to approve three-story backyard mini-apartments.
As the Boston Globereported on Sunday, Somerville's "deep ethos in favor of new housing" is being tested by the extent of the state law. Elected officials are describing the potential for three-story ADUs as a "joke," and the area's state lawmakers, including one who voted for the state law, are demanding reforms to stop them.
The law in question was a statewide accessory dwelling unit (ADU) legalization tucked inside a major housing package of mostly new spending programs that passed in 2024.
The bill required municipalities to allow ADUs of either 900 square feet or half the size of the primary dwelling (whichever is smaller) anywhere single-family homes are allowed. A subsequent rule issued by state regulators also forbade localities from imposing height and bulk limits on ADUs that are stricter than the limits imposed on primary dwellings.
That latter rule is what's causing Somerville's freakout.
Because the town allows triple-decker apartments (a three-story triplex common in New England) in all its single-family zones, the state rule means that it must also allow ADUs to be three stories tall.
The Globe story notes that the mini-triple-deckers could still only be 900 square feet, meaning each floor of a mini-triple-decker would have to be pretty small. Thus far, no one has proposed building an ADU tower in Somerville.
Even so, the town is worried that someone will eventually propose one of these "out-of-scale" units that it'll have to approve. Its officials are now agitating for changes to the state law to prevent this.
On the one hand, one can perhaps understand why Somerville officials feel blindsided.
The text of the 2024 ADU law allows localities to set "reasonable" height and bulk limits on accessory units. It was state regulators who decided after the law's passage that requiring ADUs to be shorter than the primary unit was "unreasonable."
On the other hand, allowing a second home on a lot to be as tall as the first house sounds "reasonable" enough. Can one complain about out-of-scale development when the new unit is the same height as an existing home and a little bit smaller?
Somerville is not the first city where people's own colloquial definition of an accessory unit as "a tiny home that doesn't bother anyone" has clashed with official regulatory definitions that allow ADUs to be a fair bit bigger.
San Diego's ADU Bonus program once allowed a technically unlimited number of ADUs to be built on single-family parcels near transit stops. (Height and bulk regulations imposed practical limits on how many units could fit on a site.)
That enabled developers to build what were, in effect, ADU apartment complexes on large single-family lots throughout the city. This year, the city imposed new restrictions to stop these "monster" ADU developments, including a per-lot accessory unit cap.
The latest dust-up in Somerville, like the San Diego controversy before it, provides several lessons about the realities of housing reform.
The first is that the definition of "accessory dwelling unit" is completely arbitrary.
In Massachusetts, an ADU is a 900-square-foot home that can be one story or three stories, depending on the town and zoning district it's being built in.
In Montana, it's a 1,000-square-foot unit. In California, state law can require localities to allow ADUs as large as 1,200 square feet. Under certain conditions, these ADUs can even be sold separately from the main house.
At a certain point, an accessory dwelling unit is just a dwelling unit. A house is a house.
The second lesson is that any ADU reform that is actually intended to produce new housing units is going to cause controversy.
State and local laws allowing ADUs have been one of the more common forms of housing reforms to pass.
Supply-boosters see them as a way to get a modest number of new units. Supply skeptics don't see much to object to about allowing someone to install a kitchenette and bathroom in their garage.
If the ADU regulations don't allow much more than the garage conversion, supply-boosters will be disappointed and push for expansions of the law. California passed dozens of ADU laws before they started enabling actual units to be built.
If an ADU law actually allows more homes, the ADUs will look like homes, and the supply skeptics will be mad.
No amount of branding or planning will resolve the inherent conflict of some people wanting more development while others oppose it in their neighborhoods.
Thus far, Massachusetts' ADU law has been modestly productive. The state's ADU survey reports that 2,048 ADU permits have been issued since the state law went into effect in January 2025. About half of those units are attached ADUs (think the garage with the kitchenette).
That's a little under 10 percent of Massachusetts total housing production during that time, per the Census Bureau's building permit survey.
At 50 units permitted, Somerville has actually approved the second most ADUs of any jurisdiction in the state. (Boston has only approved 49.)
But now that it's facing the prospect of allowing ADUs that look like actual homes, it's starting to get cold feet about the new law.
While Spain is tightening its tenant protections and rent controls in the face of housing protests, Portugal is trying to remove regulations on its rental housing industry. Either way, housing protesters are clashing with police.
The Urban Institute has a new white paper on whether data center development is coming at the expense of housing development.
A new report on home construction in Chicago finds that the practice of aldermanic privilege (where individual aldermen can veto projects in their district) is strangling development.
A school security official at an elite Boston school has been charged with the rape of a woman visiting from Ireland after police say they found her naked on the side of the road outside the Massachusetts State Police barracks on Martha's Vineyard.
The suspect was allegedly a guest at the barracks visiting a state trooper friend from college, prosecutors said in court at his arraignment.
Edward Brown, 27, pleaded not guilty in connection with the alleged Aug. 15 attack, which prosecutors said took place inside the barracks.
He allegedly met the victim at The Ritz, a bar in Oak Bluffs — the upscale waterfront community where former President Barack Obama owns a home.
Police say they received two 911 calls around 1 a.m. and arrived to find a naked woman in distress. She said she had been approached by a man at the bar before blacking out.
Assistant District Attorney Courtney Scalice presented a graphic account of what happened in court, telling the judge the victim told investigators she had been followed around the bar by a Black man in a white hat, before she awoke face down and naked.
She told investigators he held her down despite her kicking and screaming. Eventually, she asked for water, and when her attacker left, she said she "ran for her life" out of the building.
She told police she ran down two flights of stairs and out of the building and had been on the road for a few minutes before someone stopped to help.
The responding Oak Bluffs police officers saw bruises on her legs and a red mark on her neck, Scalice said.
Brown had allegedly been staying at the barracks as a guest of a trooper stationed there for the summer. Prosecutors identified the trooper as Ryan Costello and said they found Brown with help from a bouncer at The Ritz, the bar where the victim allegedly met her attacker.
The bouncer didn't know his name but knew he was friends with state troopers and had a photo. Oak Bluffs police sent the picture to Costello on Aug. 29, two weeks after the alleged assault, Scalice said. He identified the man shown as Brown and said they'd been friends since college.
Then on Sept. 11, Costello's attorney gave investigators screenshots of a text conversation between the trooper and Brown, Scalice said.
Brown allegedly gave shifting accounts of the night to Costello, Scalice told the judge: First he denied bringing a female to the barracks, then he said she'd come inside but left on her own, and then he claimed he left her in the Uber and she never came in.
At one point, he allegedly texted Costello, "I'm at the barracks with this chick, is that okay?"
Costello, who prosecutors said was not there at the time, replied, "okay." Brown then allegedly asked him where to find condoms and added, "Beers after I slam."
Once detectives identified a suspect and obtained a search warrant for Brown's Uber account, detectives also found a ride from about a half hour before the 911 calls.
"Officers interviewed the Uber driver who confirmed picking up a Black male matching the defendant's description and a very young looking White female and driving them to the State Police barracks," Scalice said. "The Uber driver described the female as appearing very intoxicated while the Black male was not."
Brown is listed in jail records as 5 feet, 11 inches tall and 260 pounds. Prosecutors said that they learned from Boston police that he had been the subject of four police reports from two ex-girlfriends claiming he had been harassing them between March and August of this year.
The victim is from Ireland and has returned home. Scalice said she had been swabbed for DNA and that male samples suitable for comparison had been recovered.
Oak Bluffs police, working with the Boston Police Department's anti-corruption division, arrested Brown at Boston Latin Academy, where he worked in school security, on Oct. 9. Police allegedly found suspected cocaine in his wallet during the arrest.
"The Massachusetts State Police has had no involvement in the Oak Bluffs Police Department’s investigation," Oak Bluffs Police Chief Jonathan Searle said in a Sept. 10 statement, a month before Brown's arrest. "As part of its investigation, Oak Bluffs Police developed probable cause and applied for and received court-authorized search warrants related to the investigation, including warrants executed at the State Police barracks."
"These allegations are deeply troubling," Massachusetts State Police Col. Geoffrey Noble said. "The Massachusetts State Police are fully cooperating with the ongoing criminal investigation and conducting an internal review of applicable policies, visitor authorization procedures and compliance with established requirements. I am committed to maintaining the highest standards of safety, security and accountability at all State Police facilities and ensuring that any identified deficiencies are addressed with appropriate corrective action."
MSP no longer allows guests to stay at police housing on Martha's Vineyard or Nantucket as a result of this case.
Brown was released on $10,000 cash bail after his arraignment on Oct. 13. Prosecutors had requested $50,000 bail.
The judge ordered him to stay away from the victim and any witnesses. He's due back in court on Dec. 11.
"Mr. Brown has entered a plea of not guilty and denies the allegations," his defense lawyer, Anthony Ellison, told Fox News Digital Monday. "He maintains full faith in the legal process and looks forward to presenting his case in court. A zealous defense will be mounted on his behalf, as there are always two sides to every story."
Police said Shawn Oliver was arrested on suspicion of operating under influence of alcohol after a car crash
The Republican candidate for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts announced the suspension of his campaign on Sunday hours after he was arrested in a suspected drunk-driving crash.
Shawn Oliver, a city councilor in New Bedford and a corrections officer, said in a post on X he was ending his campaign because “the election is too important to be overshadowed by personal matters”.
Head of group opposing measure, which would bar Somerville from dealing with firms supporting alleged Israeli international law violations, says 'it makes Jews feel unwelcome'
In a near unanimous vote, city council members in Cambridge, Massachusetts, adopted a policy order suggesting that local law enforcement authorities shouldn't arrest or prosecute sex workers.
With eight members voting yes and one voting present during the council's October 5 meeting, the new policy aims to "let folks in our community know that we do stand in support of not arresting or prosecuting people who sell sex," as Councilor Patricia M. Nolan put it.
The order's stipulation with regard to sex customers, however, is unclear. And what practical effect it will have is uncertain, since Cambridge City Council members can't change Massachusetts state law, under which both buying and selling sex are still crimes.
The new policy order states that it is the council's "belief that the arrest of adult persons for consensual sex work should continue to be amongst the lowest law enforcement priorities for the City of Cambridge" and that "the Middlesex County District Attorney should cease prosecution of persons for consensual adult sex work and cease prosecution of persons who provide support services to sex workers absent unlawful means."
The district attorney's office does not have to take this recommendation, of course. Still, it seems meaningful that government officials are urging prosecutors to adopt some level of decriminalization policy when it comes to prostitution. The Cambridge City Council isn't even the first in the area to do so. "In 2019, Somerville City Council voted to direct Somerville police not to arrest sex workers," Cambridge Daypoints out.
Originally, some Cambridge authorities wanted to go even further. An earlier draft of the order urged "the State House to support efforts to achieve the full decriminalization of consensual adult sex work statewide," but that language was removed before passage of the final policy last week. The change was made so as "not [to be] taking a stand on…full decriminalization of the buyer," Nolan said at the meeting.
Yet according to The Cambridge Somerville Independent, Council Member Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, who authored the new policy, said that even as adopted it still supports full decriminalization (that is, decriminalization of both full-service sex work providers and their clients):
In the version that passed, some councillors believed they voted for something different: that customers remain seen as criminals and that the goal is to end sex work rather than allow the trade to continue safely with protections for human and worker rights. "People are going to read it a little differently," Sobrinho-Wheeler said, but he and supporters believe the order continues to cover clients and suppliers of sex work.
Sex worker rights advocates are calling the policy—which also includes plans for a phone line that sex workers can use to report crimes against them without having to interact with police—a win.
"Victories seem rare. This one is special because of how many sex workers, survivors, and allies supported our effort," Mary Carol, co-chair of the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective, said in a press release.
During the public comment portion of the council's October 5 meeting, at least 27 people—including current and former sex workers, lawyers, and people in social services—spoke in support of full decriminalization.
"I choose to do this work and I choose to do this work without going to jail for it," said Rita Romero, who said she has been "a sex worker for over 20 years."
A woman describing herself as "a student, a mother, an advocate, and a sex worker" told council members: "We are not asking you to understand every choice that we make. We are asking you to understand that criminalization does not make us disappear, it only changes how safely we are able to exist."
"Our commonwealth should protect people's dignity, not punish them for trying to survive," opined Kayla Kittredge, an independent candidate for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts.
Several speakers who described themselves as survivors of sex trafficking supported the policy order. This included Quinn, who said she was "pushed into the sex industry as a teenager" and still supports full decriminalization.
Clients "didn't hurt me because of a lack of punishment," Quinn said. "They were able to hurt me because I had a lack of power, political power, to keep myself safe and to determine the trajectory of my own life. The fact is full decriminalization—not partial, not the equality model—only full decriminalization has been proven to afford both trafficking victims and sex workers more political power, actual political power."
Only three people—two with the group Safe Exit, which helps people who do not want to be selling sexual services to stop doing so—spoke against the policy.
Safe Exit's Audra Dooty said the policy would "hurt people and get more vulnerable folks sucked into the life" and advocated what's alternately known as the Nordic model, the equality model, or partial decriminalization, in which sex workers are not criminalized but their clients are.
Several speakers at the council meeting directly opposed any policy that still prioritizes arresting sex buyers. Claudia Torres, a staff attorney at Justice at Work, noted that while some say decriminalization removes protection for vulnerable people, "vulnerability does not make meaningful consent impossible. Whether coercion is present is a fact-intensive, context-specific inquiry."
"Criminalizing buyers does not eliminate dangerous clients or exploitation," said Molly Lynch, a licensed clinical social worker. Instead, it "makes it harder for sex workers to protect themselves from those dangers." Lynch added that having worked with street-based sex workers, she learned that "sex workers are experts in their own safety."
"In other industries, like domestic work, we say the solution is giving people more labor protections," Jessica Van Meir told the council. "We don't say the solution to trafficking of domestic workers is to criminalize hiring a maid."
The new Cambridge policy order puts on the record what already seems to be police policy. Shameka Gregory with the city's Domestic and Gender-Based Violence Prevention Initiative said the Cambridge Police Department has made only about four sex worker arrests in the past five years. She did not say if any or how many solicitation arrests were made.
But even if local police aren't proactively going after prostitution, sex workers and/or their customers in the area may still face arrests and prosecutions. In recent years, Cambridge has been the home of a high-profile "brothel" bust involving both federal and state police. More than 30 clients were arrested and prosecuted on state charges, and three people who ran the business were prosecuted on federal charges.
In the News
Where will the Trump administration livesteam its firing squad? (What a sentence to have to write.) "Depending on how much [social media platforms] want to bend over backwards (or should I say, bow down?) to appease Donald Trump and the bloodthirsty Pete Hegseth, all of them except Meta can make unfortunately credible claims that livestreaming an execution by firing squad doesn't technically violate their policies," notes Mike Masnick at Techdirt. "Meta cannot say that. I'd argue that the videos likely do violate YouTube, X, and TikTok's policies as well, but it very much depends on subjective calls for all three."
"Remember, some of the earliest moral panic over how 'bad' social media is came from US elected officials losing their minds about terrorist execution videos on YouTube," adds Masnick:
It's kind of incredible how far we've come: Now the US government itself is planning to stream a gruesome execution of its own, and any platform that pushes back will likely be attacked by the president and his supporters for not being patriotic enough.
Continuing in what's apparently a surrealist theme of today's newsletter…
On Substack
Will Ukraine decriminalize porn to help fund its military? Sofya Owl has helped fund Ukraine's defense efforts by selling nude photos. That could make her a criminal in Ukraine, "where producing and distributing pornography remains a criminal offense," explains Mariana Lastovyria at The Counteroffensive:
For years, it has had a thriving market for adult content that operates largely in the shadows.
Now, as the country faces a roughly $27 billion shortfall in defense funding, lawmakers are considering whether to remove pornography from the criminal code—potentially bringing part of that underground economy into the legal tax base. This gap is critical, as the money is needed now to pay for supplies at the front line for the first quarter of 2027.
According to recent estimates by Ukrainian lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, who co-authored a bill to decriminalize pornography production, legalizing the industry could bring the state budget up to $25 million a year in tax revenue. He says that amount would be enough to purchase around 30,000 drones.
Read This Thread
Why are campus administrators teaching about sex toys?
Setting aside whether universities should be in the business of providing this kind of advice, the real question is why therapeutic bureaucracies are now somehow responsible for attending to every last private corner of student life, right down to the "bondage and fetish gear." https://t.co/TmJ7ayMM5C
Two very different Flock rulings: Last week, this newsletter covered a federal court ruling in which the judge called automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems such as Flock "a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance." But all is not well in Flock/Fourth Amendment jurisprudence.
"A decision that a California judge issued the following day, which dismissed a lawsuit arguing that San Jose's ALPR network violates the state constitution, is much more typical of litigation in this area, which so far has been almost uniformly unsuccessful," reportsReason's Jacob Sullum. More:
The contrast between those two decisions suggests the challenges such lawsuits face as judges grapple with the implications of Supreme Court precedents involving cellphone location data. Although the relevance of those precedents might seem obvious, state and federal courts generally have perceived important differences between cellphone tracking and police use of roadside cameras that record images of passing cars.
• Always read Chris Ferguson on cellphone ban studies (and do it quick before he gets himself locked in a padded room rather than have to scream about effect sizes one more time).
• The winner of Britain's prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing is now under question, after "the AI detector Pangram flag[ged] almost the entire story as AI-generated," notesThe Atlantic. And "this isn't the first prize-winning story to be flagged by Pangram. It comes after similar scandals over this year's Commonwealth Prize and Prix Goncourt—two other renowned literature contests—in which Pangram flagged AI use among finalists."
• "The case for screen time limits rests in part on an unproven assumption that fewer hours will mean fewer anxious and depressed kids. The best evidence doesn't support it," writes the Columbia University psychiatrist Jonathan Slater in The New York Times:
Limiting screen time can promote children's overall health. But the amount of time children spend on screens has only a small effect on their mental health. Genetics and certain experiences in childhood, as well as the lack of proper diagnosis and treatment, appear to be far more influential. Limiting screen time is not the first line of treatment for children with anxiety or depression.
• Abortion pill update: "The Food and Drug Administration expects to complete its safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone in March," reports NBC. In a court document filed by the Department of Justice last Wednesday, the agency "said it plans to compare mifepristone's safety to that of surgical abortions through 10 weeks' gestation. Its review will measure the frequency of side effects among roughly 100,000 women who took mifepristone, it said."
• Is AI slop what the people really want? "They like the slop, they're eager for more, and whoever's serving it to them is just fulfilling the authentic demand for unlimited AI-generated garbage," suggests Jeremiah Johson at The Argument.
• A win for cryptocurrency: "The U.S. Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has withdrawn its proposal for a rule that would require financial institutions to report on cryptocurrency transactions that they 'know, suspect, or have reason to suspect' involve mixing in a foreign jurisdiction," reportsReason's Matthew Petti. "The proposal was first made in October 2023, and the government withdrew it this week, citing complaints from the crypto industry and privacy concerns."
The U.S. midterm elections are not limited to Tuesday, November 3. For millions of voters, Election Day will begin much earlier, either through in-person early voting or by casting a mail-in ballot, despite recent attempts by President Donald Trump to restrict and overhaul mail-in voting.
Login
