Michael Jeffries — the former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO whose racy ads fueled the chain’s meteoric rise in the 2000s — is mentally fit to stand trial for sex trafficking, a prosecution psychologist testified on Thursday.
Jeffries, 81, was logical, “jovial,” and often funny during two days of testing last year, according to Tracy O’Connor Pennuto, the federal prison system’s only forensic neuropsychologist.
“‘We could be married,'” Pennuto recalled the ex-CEO telling her during one evaluation. “I’m gay, but that doesn’t matter,” she said he added.
“He had appropriate humor,” she told the federal judge presiding over Jeffries’ competency hearing in Central Islip, NY. “He was funny.”
The ex-CEO was able to handle his commissary account and manage his phone time throughout his four-month stay at the mental health unit of a North Carolina prison, Pennuto testified.
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And while his defense lawyers say Jeffries suffers from major cognitive impairment — the result, they say, of progressing Alzheimer’s disease and a neurodegenerative condition called Lewy body dementia — Jeffries shows only mild impairment, Pennuto countered.
The ex-CEO does not display the memory loss and lack of function associated with Alzheimer’s, she testified. In fact, he performed “better than probably 90% of the patients that we assess for competency,” she said.
Thursday’s testimony came on the third day of a weeklong competency hearing before US District Judge Nusrat Chowdhury, who will also preside over Jeffries’s sex trafficking trial, scheduled to begin October 26.
At issue is whether the former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO understands the charges against him and is capable of assisting in his own defense, the two criteria for competency.
Chowdhury has not said when she will rule on Jeffries’ competency; the hearing, originally slated for three days, is now scheduled to continue Friday.
Earlier this week, three defense witnesses testified that scans and verbal assessments show that Jeffries’ brain is atrophying.
Defense psychiatrist on Wednesday cited the ex-CEO’s identical response when asked when he graduated from high school, college, and the London School of Economics: “1962.”
More significantly, Jeffries cannot understand or even name the charges against him, and is prone to profanity and outbursts, the defense’s experts told the judge.
“There was no sense of gravity,” defense psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Bardey told the judge on Wednesday. “His demeanor was like he was at some sort of cocktail party.”
On Thursday, Jeffries’ prison psychologist said that he called her “bitch” and “girl” during their interviews, and cursed, too, when frustrated by the more difficult questions in her testing.
“He was purposefully testing the limits and enjoying it, to see what my reaction would be,” Pennuto said, “but he was able to inhibit that behavior” when asked, she added.
Jeffries was CEO from 1992 until his 2014 retirement, helming an international clothing chain beloved by teenage millennials and masterminding a yearslong ad campaign featuring shirtless, athletic young men.
Prosecutors say that during his final eight years at the retail giant’s helm, Jeffries used his wealth and power to abuse dozens of aspiring A&F models at drug-fueled “sex events” at his secluded Hamptons estate and at luxury hotels in Manhattan, Europe, Morocco, and Saint Barthelemy.
Jeffries’ co-defendants in the case are his longtime romantic partner, Matthew Smith, and James Jacobson, a former A&F employee.
The three were arrested in October 2024 on charges of sex trafficking and interstate prostitution involving 15 accusers, and have pleaded not guilty.
They face a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years and as much as life in prison if convicted.