The House With The Lights On

She hates that the reporter called her mother.

"We don't talk," she snaps.

But she asks what her mom said. The anger drains from her face. The answer to her next question matters very much.

"Did she believe it?"

For the next hour, Britton pulls at the Frappuccino straw as if she's at the malt shop and tells the story of a conventional girlhood near Portland, on a berry farm in Boring. "There was a big sign." She laughs. "Welcome to Boring, Oregon."

When she was little, she played dress-up with her sister. In high school? Track, swim team, cheerleader. She wrote a column for the school paper called "Brandy Bears It." Coyly, she explains, "We were the Bruins."

A guy in a green apron interrupts. They're closing.

Britton stands and offers to lead the way back to her house. She points to the parking lot. "I'm in the old burgundy Nissan."

Her voice rises.

"Even though I run a prosti tution ring" -- the heads of two customers whip around and stare -- " supposedly ," she emphasizes, "I don't have any money."

* * *

What happened? Britton was such a remarkable young woman, the first in her family to go to college when she entered Oregon State at 19, "a starry-eyed little girl who wants to be a vet," she says. She wound up majoring in biology and sociology and took seriously the professor who told her, "It's not enough to study the problems of the world. We have to do something about them."

She became an activist. While earning two degrees, with honors, and rearing two children with her first husband, Britton volunteered at a battered women's shelter and helped create the university's first "safe ride" program for escorting women on campus at night.

By the time she turned 30, she was finishing her PhD in sociology from the University of California at San Francisco and would soon be headed east to an assistant professorship at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

At first, in Baltimore, things went well. Very well.

Other professors called her work "really top-notch" and "invaluable." The College of Arts and Sciences dean praised her "outstanding service record" and mentoring skills. Her students wrote letters:

"When your life as a woman is difficult," read a note from Bonnie Woodall, dated Dec. 16, 1996, "and you think that what you do is in vain, remember the students you have taught. . . . You have made a difference."

When Britton got a raise, her department chairman, Derek Gill, sent a personal note of congratulations. When she received a $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the link between violence and drug use in poor women in Baltimore, he called it "a remarkable achievement for an Assistant Professor in her third year of UMBC."

But the workload was taxing -- and getting worse. Britton asked for extra compensation. Gill agreed. The university didn't. Her request was denied, although a similar request by a male colleague was granted.

More injustice, she perceived. Her activism took over. Her mother had taught her to "fight back," as Britton wrote in the dedication to her dissertation. So she did.

Memos circulated back and forth, creating in her department (as one memo put it) "a blizzard of written and verbal communication." There were investigations into Britton's NIH grant; grumblings by her fellow faculty and complaints by students that included, according to court papers, Britton's "calling them late at night and demanding they come to her house for something work related and then failing to answer the door."

Only a few years earlier, she had experienced a similar undoing in California: She left her job researching drug abuse amid a blaze of litigation -- and sued her employer for gender discrimination. Now, in Baltimore, Britton's life was imploding again. She filed another gender discrimination lawsuit, this time suing UMBC for $10 million. (A federal judge would later dismiss the case; a UMBC spokesman declined to discuss the case while Britton's appeal is pending.) Just before Christmas 1999, she quit the university she once saw "as a stepping stone."

By then, many in her department had turned against her -- a corrosive fact made obvious when her department chairman had a heart attack. Britton asked about visiting Gill in the hospital. Instead, she alleged in court papers, she received a voice mail from the graduate student dating Gill:

"Brandy . . . this is a message direct from Dr. Gill. There is no person on Earth he'd rather see less than you. . . . Stay away from him, leave us alone. You have been a major contributor to this."

* * *

The Frappuccino is half-finished.

She has changed into black sweats, black cardigan and an oversized Testudo's Troops T-shirt, and she materializes in her bedroom -- a place of Asian-inspired tranquility, complete with a canopy bed draped in chiffon, beaded curtains and floating shelves of Asian statues.

Crawling onto the bed, she sits cross-legged and talks for another 4 1/2 hours. Night turns to early morning, and she periodically stands at the end of her bed, stroking the skin of her lower stomach and upper thigh. It's an unconscious habit, like twirling her hair or picking at her cuticles.

She believes, she is saying, her colleagues at UMBC got together and decided, "How are we going to do her in?" She believes they wiretapped her phones and put her under other kinds of surveillance. "I was devoted," she continues. "I spent my whole life working for that. . . . It wasn't just a job to me. It was my life." She left UMBC and "just thought, 'I'm going to lay down and die. I'm so depressed.' "

Since quitting, she has filed for bankruptcy twice and struggled against five foreclosures on her Ellicott City home. In 2001, she filed a $30,000 lawsuit after a car accident, settling later for an undisclosed amount. For about seven months, between October 2003 and April 2004, Britton worked for the Baltimore City Public Schools in the research department.

Ask where she's worked in the past couple of years, and she starts to answer, then suddenly recommends a book: "Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry."

* * *

"It's been a descent for Brandy," her mother says. "Life was going badly. . . . She wanted someone there for her."

That someone turned out to be Isamu Tubyangye.

They met online in March 2002, when Tubyangye answered her Yahoo.com personal ad. He was a 6-foot-5, 31-year-old who worked, she says, for AOL.

Three months later, they married, and over the next three years, Britton, who wrote her dissertation on battered women, filed several domestic violence reports against Tubyangye: "He assaulted me with . . . wooden shoes, a chair"; "tied me up with strapping tape"; "stabbed me in the neck." In a request for a restraining order against him, she wrote: "He attacked me when I tried to discuss separation." Though she filed for divorce six months after their wedding, the paperwork was never finalized.

Tubyangye, who did not respond to repeated voice and e-mail messages asking for an interview, was charged several times with first- and second-degree assault. He, too, petitioned the Howard County court with his own accusations, including that Britton's request for a restraining order came a convenient seven days "after I had given her all of my student loan money . . . $8600," and "my wife is in possession of an unregistered firearm."

By the beginning of last year, Tubyangye was charged with two counts of second-degree assault and one count of violating his probation by violating the restraining order. A bench warrant was issued, and he was briefly jailed in March 2005. That's when, Britton says, he attempted to frame her by directing police to a Web site where Britton appeared to be advertising herself as a prostitute.

And now, she says, "they've decided to go after me instead of him."

* * *

But what about the other Web site? The Alexis Angel Web site. The defunct site that police say shows she had "other girls working for her." The site with erotic pictures of the naked front and back sides of a woman who looks a whole lot like Britton. The site that begins with this disclaimer:

"Money exchanged . . . for modeling is simply for my time and companionship. . . . This is not an offer of prostitution."

The site where Alexis is described as a "quintessential 'brick house' " and "sophisticated, refined, educated and articulate. She has two Bachelor of Science degrees, one in biology and the other in sociology. She also holds a Ph.D. from an elite university." It continues: "An athlete, cheerleader and dancer in high school, Alexis has continued her . . . training and is extremely flexible in excellent shape." It ends, "I AM VERY CREATIVE AND LOVE TO TRY NEW THINGS."

Alexis's fees rival those of a K Street lawyer. An "incall" (at her house) service for "individual clients" runs $300 per hour, $550 for two hours, $800 for three hours. Couples pay almost double those rates, and "two-girl services" cost more than double.

The phone number on the site is Britton's cell.

The domain name is registered to her.

The question is asked:

What about Alexis Angel?

The woman who can make a Frappuccino last six hours and discuss -- at length -- everything from playing dress-up to fighting for underprivileged women, takes a final draw on her green Starbucks straw. She sets the plastic cup on the nightstand.

Her face has hardened.

"I can't discuss that with you."

* * *

Now there's a new Web site, featuring "Claire."

This site displays an open antique book and a still life of French wine, plump grapes and fine cheese -- and a gallery of erotic photos of a nearly naked woman, adorned only in a selection of feather boas, garter belts and bits of black lingerie.

Like Alexisangel.com, the site offers a bio of Claire as "sophisticated, refined, educated and articulate. She holds a post-graduate degree from an elite university." And: "An athlete, cheerleader and dancer since childhood, Claire has continued her dance and athletic training and is extremely flexible and in excellent physical shape." Linked reviews praise Claire in quite complimentary terms. Exults one: "She took several months off and is just back!! It has been 3 very long months waiting for her!!!"

On Mother's Day, in the late afternoon, Britton answers her front door, agitated and dressed in a little red T-shirt, black nylon shorts and bare feet. She is upstairs "with my kids," she says, and can't talk to the reporter now. She says goodbye and begins closing her leaded glass door, and for a moment, the words of her T-shirt are caught in the frame of the door:

"Bad Girl," it says across her chest, "with good intentions."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.