Animal Crush Pornographer Gets 3.75 Year Fed Prison Sentence

HOUSTON, TX — An epilogue was recently written in one of the stranger cases to come out of the Bayou City in a local time.

Brent Justice, 55, was sentenced to about 5 years in federal prison for making and selling 'animal crush' videos, which depicted women mutilating small animals for the sexual gratification of viewers.

Justice would videotape his accomplice Ashley Nicole Richards, 25, as well as several other women, stepping on and killing various types and species of animals.

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Like any pornographer, the duo sold videos that teased the viewer. These so-called 'soft' crush videos showed Richards in stripper heels stepping on crawfish, crabs and insects. The pair would stream the videos on dollar-a-minute cam sites for crush fetishists.

Richards and Justice would also take on commissions, a fairly common practice in the world of pornography. Viewers would send the pair a request for Richards to kill a specific type of animal in a specific way.

In one of the more infamous videos, Richards, in a black bra, short shorts, heels and a masquerade mask, runs a six-inch long kris — an Asian dagger with a distinctive, wavy blade — along the back of a small, white cat that had been duct taped to the floor.

All throughout the eight minute, 16 second clip Richards taunts, torments and terrorizes the cat — but she doesn't kill it. That comes later, and it's sadistic and methodical.
Richards performed — if that's the right word for it — under the name of Cruel Meshalette and was part of a group called the Ebony Crush Girls, all of whom Justice allegedly recruited through dating sites catering to Africans.
Since their arrest in 2012, Richards has provided cagey, often contradictory, descriptions about her relationship to Justice.

At times she referred to him as her uncle, in a 2011 arrest record out of Waco she called him her step father and in testimony at the state and federal trials she portrayed him as her pimp and the brains behind the operation.
She testified that Justice was the one who set the whole thing up, he introduced her to crush videos, he shot and edited them and he's the one who sold them on the internet. She even tried to convince the courts that she didn't want to hurt the animals.
Then again, she — not Justice — is the one featured in a video labeled "puppy2." The video was found on a laptop that was seized from the home Justice and Richards shared when they were arrested.
Over the course of the video's 13-minute plus run time, Richards tortures and kills a defenseless puppy in a kitchen.

The video shows the puppy's mouth duct taped shut. He struggled, tried to get away. Richards attacked him with a meat cleaver. She hit him, again and again. Blood spattered on the wall.

She talks dirty to the camera as she chopped off one of the puppy's paws. She hacks at the puppy's head and neck. She decapitates the puppy. Then she pisses on his corpse.

For her part in all this, Richards got 10-year's state prison term for animal cruelty and 3.5 years fed time for violating federal anti-animal crush laws. Justice got 50 years state time and 4.75 years fed time.

Image credit: via Shutterstock