Brad Rouse
Founder
I grew up in St. Louis then graduated from Harvard College in 1995. I worked as a theater director in New York City until my life briefly derailed. In 2008, I accepted responsibility for my part in an illegal drug case then spent a year at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Since 2018, I’ve worked as a freelance justice mitigation specialist. I’ve helped hundreds of clients prepare for sentencing with supportive counseling and written statements. I help them adapt for a better future through essential guidance like sober coaching.
I’ve worked on federal and state cases from Alaska to Florida to Hawaii to Maine. I’ve worked with immigrant clients from countries like Uzbekistan, Uganda, Pakistan, India, Ghana, South Korea, China, Thailand, Mexico, Philippines, and Venezuela—plus survivors of wars and revolutions in Iran, Vietnam, Laos, and South Sudan.
My clients have faced charges like healthcare and securities fraud, drug distribution, aggravated battery, tax evasion, labor trafficking, illegal bookmaking, plus violations of anti-kickback statutes and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. I’ve helped military veterans, doctors, dentists, trauma survivors, recovering addicts, plus well-known performers, athletes, entrepreneurs, and government officials.
I wrote about MDC-Brooklyn in Hit the Body Alarm starring Winsome Brown at The Performing Garage. The following year, the Off-Broadway Alliance nominated my production of Goldstein for Best New Musical. My Rotten Mango podcast interview has over 1.2 million views so far.
For almost thirty years, I’ve worked with theater legends like Carol Burnett, Harold Prince, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Billy Porter, Anthony Rapp, and Anthony Hopkins. I directed the world premiere of Billy Porter’s Ghetto Superstar at the Public Theater. I directed at City Center (NYC), Ahmanson (LA), Edinburgh Fringe, Juilliard, LaMama, and NYU. My theater productions were featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes II and NPR’s All Things Considered.
Visit BradRouse.com to learn more.
“. . .a client will often spend time with Brad Rouse, who is the expert in written narrative. . .One unexpected feature of these narratives is how much of the story hints at a rehabilitation that...calls back to a time when confinement was about reform and salvation . . . put all the parts together, and the buoyant takeaway for any judge reading it is that maybe his job is already done. Nothing isolates one’s crime, and all the moral dereliction that comes with it, quite like a story in which the jail time, which hasn’t even started, already seems to be receding into the past.”
The New York Times Magazine