Chris Brown will not serve prison time for attacking a music producer with a tequila bottle at a London nightclub in February 2023. A judge in London handed the Grammy-winning singer an eight-month sentence on Monday, suspended for a year.
Brown, 37, pleaded guilty in July to a single count of affray over the incident, which happened on the dance floor of Tape, a private club in Mayfair. He had faced up to three years in prison. Affray covers the use or threat of unlawful violence that causes someone to fear for their safety.
Video shown in court captured Brown striking his former friend Abraham Diaw twice in the head with a glass bottle before being pulled away.
“The repeated use of a glass bottle in that way, especially aimed at the head, was plainly dangerous, it carried the risk of delivering a more serious injury than was ultimately sustained,” Judge Tony Baumgartner said.
Baumgartner said Brown avoided a custodial sentence because of his guilty plea and several mitigating factors. The judge noted Brown’s prior convictions but said he had kept a clean record in recent years.
Brown left the UK after the attack and was not arrested until May 2025, when he was detained at a Manchester hotel after flying in for a concert. He had been out on bail of 5 million pounds ($6.7 million), a condition that still let him tour Europe and North America last summer.
Brown broke out as a teenage star in 2005 and won his first Grammy for best R&B album in 2011 for “F.A.M.E.” He took home the same award in 2025 for “11:11 (Deluxe).”
He has faced repeated legal trouble since his 2009 felony conviction for assaulting then-girlfriend Rihanna hours before the two were set to perform at the Grammys, including arrests in multiple U.S. states and a 2019 detention in Paris on suspicion of rape, after which he was released without charge.
