Chris Brown may wonder if his assault on Rihanna will haunt him for the rest of his life. Three years after he beat her with his fists just before the Grammys in Los Angeles, Brown is scheduled to return to a Los Angeles courtroom today to answer questions about his community service.
It is his first court appearance in more than a year. This appearance was brought about because prosecutors had questions about whether Brown had completed his 180 days of community service that he was required to perform for the Rihanna assault. Brown, who is on probation, had to do graffiti removal, roadside cleanup and other manual labor. (The video below shows Brown clearing weeds and moving an old gate in Virginia.)
Judge Patricia Schnegg ordered an audit of Brown’s community service hours after Deputy District Attorney Mary Murray complained of a lack of clarity in Brown’s report.
The order was announced at a progress hearing for Brown. The “Look At Me Now” singer was not present for the hearing but his lawyer Pat Harris attended on his behalf. Harris did not object to the request.
Brown was ordered to do 180 days of community service as part of his punishment for assaulting Rihanna. According to Murray, the number of service hours and where he completed the service were unclear. Murray was also suspicious because he supposedly performed his hours in Virginia, where he is originally from, instead in Los Angeles, where the beating took place. In addition to the community service, he got 5 years of probation, a year of domestic violence counseling and a restraining order barring him from contact with Rihanna.
Despite the assault, Rihanna told Oprah Winfrey last month that she and Brown are still in love, and they hooked up over the summer on a yacht in St. Tropez that Brown had rented.
”We’ve been working on our friendship, again. Now, we’re very, very close friends. We built a trust again and that’s it,” she said during her interview on “Oprah’s Next Chapter.”
Trust is probably a word many domestic abuse experts will have a hard time reconciling for a couple where the man sent his beloved to the hospital in 2009 because he beat her up, but Rihanna struggled to explain the special bond the two of them have.
“We love each other and we probably always will,” she said in the interview that took place in her native land of Barbados. “And that’s not anything that we’re gonna try to change. It’s not something you can shut off if you’ve ever been in love.”
