By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A former assistant to a disgraced Oscar-winning songwriter who committed suicide in his Upper East Side apartment on Sunday will still face criminal charges in connection to the composer's rape and sex abuse case, prosecutors said.
Shawni Lucier, 43, was charged with helping the late Joseph Brooks set up dozens of bogus "movie auditions" to lure vulnerable 18 to 22 year old women from across the country into Brooks' East 63rd Street apartment between March 2005 and April 2008, prosecutors said. When the women would arrive for the late-night auditions, they would be fooled into taking off their clothes and having sex with him under the guise of an "acting exercise" to win the role, Lucier allegedly admitted to prosecutors.
"If a woman did not sleep with Joe, that woman was sent home," Lucier allegedly explained to prosecutors. Lucier, of Washington state, was charged with two counts of criminal facilitation and was arrested in June 2009.
Brooks, 73, took his own life inside that same Upper East Side apartment Sunday by sealing a plastic bag around his head and pumping it with helium gas in his East 63rd Street home, officials said. The cause of death was ruled a suicide Monday after an autopsy confirmed he died because of asphyxiation, spokeswoman Ellen Borakove of the city's Office of Chief Medical Examiner said.
Lucier is scheduled to appear in court on Wednesday before Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Charles Solomon where Brooks' attorney will also likely appear to discuss the procedures for putting an official end to the case against his deceased client.
Prosecutors said Lucier used Craigslist to find women who were likely to go along with Brooks' ploy. Virgins were disqualified, Lucier allegedly told them in a 2009 interview.
"In the context of these women, [Lucier's] job was to weed out people who were not available for sex and to get them there," according to prosecutors.
Brooks was charged with forcing sex or sexual acts on 13 women. He had been free on $3 million bail pending a host of rape, predatory sexual assault, criminal sex act and other charges pertaining to his alleged perverse scam.
Lucier told authorities she knew what she was doing was wrong. Her attorney, Steven Fusfeld, did not immediately return a call for comment on Monday.
Brooks's 24-year-old son, Nicholas, was charged with murdering his swimsuit designer girlfriend Sylvie Cachay in a SoHo House bathtub in December 2010.
