The Real Story of the Glamorous Prosecutor Who Took on Police Violence—and Then Seemed to Implode

On the day Marilyn Mosby staged her star-making press conference on the steps of a downtown Baltimore courthouse in April 2015, I was a few blocks away sitting with the family of Freddie Gray and their attorney. Mosby announced she’d be charging six police officers in his death.

“This is a moment. This is your moment,” Mosby said. She didn’t have to say it was also her moment, because that seemed obvious. Just four months into her job as the youngest chief prosecutor of any major U.S. city at the time, Mosby seemed destined for far greater heights. The daughter of two police officers, wife of an influential City Council member, and now the chief prosecutor against those Baltimore cops in the national movement for police reform—where else would she be going but up?

Her commanding presence in front of the cameras and microphones won her a lot of new fans. Gene Demby of NPR’s Code Switch pointed out that she had about 10,000 followers on Twitter in the hour after the speech; a few hours later, that number had more than doubled. “It felt a little like Mosby has supplanted Thurgood Marshall or Claire Huxtable as the most beloved black attorney in American history,” he wrote.

Back at the attorney’s office, I watched Gray’s family and lawyers all moved to tears by Mosby’s words—even famously cocksure defense attorney Billy Murphy!—and her audacious attempt to hold Baltimore police accountable for Gray’s death. She even convinced me this might be an inflection point in the reform movement, after similar cases in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, ultimately ended with no charges or indictments. Murphy seemed to feel the same way: “I prayed to be involved in this national debate on police brutality. It was an answer to my prayers because I’m tired of it,” he said.

It’s surreal to think about all that’s happened to her and her—all of our—goals for police accountability efforts around the country since that day.

She is no longer serving in any elected capacity. Instead, in two federal court trials, Mosby has been found guilty of perjury related to COVID-19-related hardship withdrawals from her retirement account and a vacation home mortgage. She faced as many as 40 years in prison. But on Thursday, a federal judge sentenced her to 12 months of home detention, three years of supervised release, and 100 hours of community service.

Prior to her sentencing hearing, Mosby took her case to friendly media outlets like MSNBC’s The ReidOut and The Breakfast Club morning radio show. Early in May, she applied for a presidential pardon with the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus. In her writing for that, she remained defiant about her lack of guilt: “While pardon applications generally express remorse and regret, what happens when justice was not served and in fact, denied? No such remorse and regret is appropriate in this case,” Mosby wrote in her application.

More dispiriting than her spiral has been the coordinated backlash against progressive prosecutors around the country. For some time, it felt like the movement was actually gaining momentum. After a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd in 2020, many district attorneys in major urban areas pledged to hold law enforcement accountable for their abuses. But in the years since, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Philadelphia, those prosecutors have faced a series of legal and political challenges from the right that have steadily thinned their ranks.

The prosecution of Mosby, who preceded that wave of reform-minded attorneys, seems in many ways to be the ignominious end of that particular movement.

“There was great appetite for the changes of scale and scope of the problem in 2020—that appetite died in 2020,” said Phillip Atiba Solomon, a co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity and chair of African American studies and professor of psychology at Yale University.

Solomon noted that this was normal, to some extent: “If we’re looking for progress on any segment of justice, including reform, it should always be seen through the context of cycles of backlash,” he added.  As someone who’s been covering protests against police abuse for more than a decade now, I often think back to that spring afternoon in Baltimore when Mosby seemed ascendant and police reform seemed possible. What’s happened since should show us all how difficult this battle will really be. And it will require an almost superhuman level of diligence and discipline that can survive the backlash sure to come.

Charming and telegenic, Mosby quickly became a national sensation. The HuffPost asked, “Who is this objectively badass attorney running the Freddie Gray investigation?” Mosby and her husband, Nick, were invited onstage by Prince at a concert in Baltimore. She was profiled in Vogue magazine and photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

“At the time, I assumed that if they worked it correctly—and that’s a big if—but if they worked it correctly, Nick would be mayor and Marilyn would run for Senate,” said Derek Musgrove, a history professor at University of Maryland–Baltimore County and author of Rumor, Repression, and Racial Politics: How the Harassment of Black Elected Officials Shaped Post-Civil Rights America.

”That’s sort of how it could work in a best-case scenario, ” Musgrove said.

Needless to say, it did not turn out to be a best-case scenario for Mosby.

I returned to Baltimore in November 2015 for the trial of William Porter, one of the cops who was alleged to have killed Gray. Porter had dropped out of junior college and entered the Baltimore police academy in 2012, hoping to restore trust in law enforcement in the same poverty-stricken neighborhoods where he grew up. “That’s what Baltimore Police looks for,” the leader of the union for the city’s black officers told me at the time.

In 2015, nearly 40 percent of the sworn police officers in Baltimore were Black—a figure that dwarfed much larger cities like Los Angeles and Dallas. But after his arrest, Porter became an example of the failed promise of community policing. He was charged with failing to seek medical treatment for Gray, who was cuffed around his wrists, lying on his side, and loudly complaining that he couldn’t breathe in the back of a police van. It was soon discovered Gray suffered a severe spinal cord injury in the van that led to his death seven days later.

Gray’s death kicked off protests and, ultimately, riots in the same streets Porter had patrolled for three years. Having covered that fiery unrest, I could understand why many Black Baltimoreans saw a champion in Mosby. She took the anger seriously, and seemed willing to channel it into action.

“That was really a singular thing,” said Lisa Snowden, editor in Chief of Baltimore Beat, a local online news site. “When you see a lot of these folks rallying around her [now], they still remember that—that’s how powerful that moment was.”

But Mosby’s prosecutors couldn’t secure a conviction against Porter. His trial ended almost three weeks later in a mistrial, after jurors were unable to reach a verdict on any of his charges after three days of deliberation. The disappointment was palpable as I walked out of the courtroom that afternoon and followed Mosby down the same steps that she had dramatically descended eight months earlier. The swagger was gone; she hugged her prosecutors and rushed out with her security detail, taking no questions.

Up against a judge who insisted there wasn’t enough evidence to support the charges, three of the other officers allegedly involved in Gray’s death were found not guilty in separate trials in May, June, and July 2016. Finally, Mosby conceded that she had little chance of securing a conviction and dropped criminal charges against the remaining officers still awaiting trial, including Porter. She called the decision “agonizing.”

There was little anger in the streets, mostly just resignation.

“The Freddie Gray trial made me feel like we’re not ready for this part of reform,” Solomon said. “That was the one that hit me real hard.”

Part of the resignation may have had to do with how novel these trials really were. Mosby preceded the wave of big-city progressive prosecutors who took office in the years after, particularly in the wake of Floyd’s murder in 2020—Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Kim Foxx in Chicago, and Chesa Boudin in San Francisco, among many others. So, Mosby had to look to an earlier generation of prosecutors, like Kamala Harris, as role models. She touted the benefits of a diversionary program for first time, nonviolent offenders that Harris implemented as the district attorney in San Francisco. Mosby also talked about trying a “community prosecution model,” which involved assigning prosecutors to specific geographic areas to better cultivate trust with residents. She traveled around the country, visiting with other district attorneys to get ideas for how to improve her office. “I honestly believe that I’m following my passion, which has always been to reform the criminal justice system,” she told Baltimore magazine in January 2015.

But her failures in the Gray cases made her a high-profile target of Donald Trump, other prominent right-wing political figures, and law enforcement around the country. She talked of receiving racist hate mail and death threats at her office and home. In October 2015, she was the subject of a cover story headlined “The Wolf That Lurks” for the Sergeants Benevolent Association’s magazine. The cops were not on her side.

That was to be expected. But by the time the New York Times Magazine profiled her in September 2016, Mosby already seemed to be wilting under the unforgiving spotlight. In the profile, critics bemoaned several tactical errors committed by her office during the trials. She countered that Baltimore police never seriously pursued the possibility of wrongdoing by the cops and showed little enthusiasm for her investigations. Mosby also accused the police commissioner and mayor of misinforming the public about the case, showing her isolation among city leaders.

That profile also seemed to expose growing friction between her and her husband, Nick, who suffered through several embarrassing polls—mostly in the single digits—before abandoning his mayoral campaign earlier that year.

Compounding her troubles, five of the six officers charged by Mosby in Gray’s death sued her for malicious false arrest, false imprisonment, and defamation, among other claims. The 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled in 2018 that she was protected by absolute prosecutorial immunity, but it still left Mosby feeling under siege.

Times writer Wil Hylton closed his profile by pointing out that Mosby had lost quite a bit in trying those cases. “It sometimes seemed as if the only public figure who had really suffered for [Gray’s] death, who put her career and private life on the line, whether right or wrong, the elected official who paid the highest price was the one who set out to make sure someone did,” he wrote.

In Mosby’s reelection campaign in 2018, she once again faced questions about her record and legal strategy during the Freddie Gray trials. And now she had to defend her record amid a soaring local murder rate—the Washington Post said Baltimore had the greatest raw number increase in killings of any city other than Chicago.

Mosby countered by saying her staff had a felony conviction rate of 92 percent and that, true to her previous campaign promises, her office had made a priority of going after repeat offenders.

Still bolstered by the support of Baltimoreans who admired her courage in going after the police, Mosby won with 50 percent of the vote. “If the Baltimore city police doesn’t like her for charging their officers, then she’s definitely my candidate,” one voter told the Washington Post.

This time, Mosby was catching the wave of the broader national leftward shift among big-city prosecutors. She tried to build on the public trust in her office: She stopped pursuing charges against people for marijuana possession in 2019 and expanded that approach the next year to drug possession, prostitution, minor traffic violations, and other low-level offenses. One reason she gave for her efforts was to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Baltimore jails.

Bolstered by declining crime rates, Mosby said that experiment was going to become permanent. “Clearly, the data suggest there is no public safety value in prosecuting low-level offenses,” she said in March 2021.

As she made these changes, Mosby also faced accusations that she was too often out of town, on lavish trips sponsored by nonprofits and other groups, where she researched other countries’ and cities’ approaches to crime and prisons. The local online news site Baltimore Brew reported that from 2018 to 2019, none of Maryland’s other 23 county state’s attorneys reported any similar reimbursed travel. Mosby called on inspector general Isabel Mercedes Cumming to investigate in July 2020, hoping to exonerate herself with some transparency. “The people of Baltimore have endured far too many corruption scandals and need to know what is and is not illegal,” she wrote in her request to Cumming.

Depending on who you are, Cumming’s investigation uncovered, in the most generous interpretation, sloppy recordkeeping, or deliberate deception, if you were inclined to believe Mosby was using her office to enrich herself. The IG’s report found that Mosby established three different businesses in 2019, including a travel agency targeted to “underserved Black families,” which the IG concluded served mostly to write off federal tax expenses.

After the investigation was completed, Cumming forwarded it “with business and tax concerns” to the FBI. This is what opened up Mosby to a review of her financial records, leading to an indictment by a federal grand jury in January 2022. Federal prosecutors accused Mosby of falsely claiming that she suffered “adverse financial consequence” that would allow her to withdraw $90,000 from a retirement account under the CARES Act, which was passed in March 2020 to help people who were employed but could no longer afford contributions to those accounts. Mosby used that money not for necessary living expenses, but to buy a home in Kissimmee, Florida, and a condominium in Longboat Key, Florida.

In the indictment, prosecutors said, “Rather than experiencing a reduction in income in 2020, Mosby’s gross salary in 2020 increased over her gross salary in 2019, which was $238,772.04.” Prosecutors also claimed that Mosby made false statements on the loan applications for the properties in Florida.

Mosby’s attorneys countered that, “The prosecution … has been driven by malicious personal, political, and even racial animus on the part of the prosecutors” and accused them of preventing her from testifying before the grand jury that ultimately returned the indictment. “Not only did the Government fail to respond to this demand (and did not allow her to testify), it did not even take the offer seriously,” her attorneys wrote in a motion to dismiss the indictment.

In spite of her protests, Mosby was found guilty of two counts of perjury in November and again in February on a charge of making a false mortgage application. “Ms. Mosby’s conduct undermines the confidence the public deserves to have in their government officials,” acting Special Agent in Charge R. Joseph Rothrock of the FBI’s Baltimore Field Office said in a statement.

Despite facing indictment throughout 2022, Mosby still attempted to run for reelection to a third term. She finished third in the Democratic primary. Just like that, Mosby had been drummed out of political office—at the same time that many of her progressive prosecutor peers around the country were also losing their races.

Like I said before, what you think of what happened to Marilyn Mosby and her sparkling career prospects depends on a lot of things—how much you liked her in the first place, how much you agree with her vision of police reform, what your standards are for politicians to behave perfectly. What I will say is that while I’m not sure she was blameless, I think a strong case can be made that were it not for the specifically strict scrutiny her prosecution of those cops brought her, no one would have gone digging for what she did with her retirement fund or how she bought her vacation homes. And I think the cause of that scrutiny matters.

“Carl Rowan had this great line: He said, Black officials have to be purer than Caesar’s wife,” Musgrove said, quoting the late Black journalist who once appeared on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list. “And if not, someone is going to get them.”

Musgrove called it “harassment ideology,” a term he gives to the organized efforts to weaken and even unseat Black political leadership in the post–civil rights era.

Musgrove’s book gave a name to the nagging suspicion I’ve had dating back to my days covering City Hall in Shreveport, Louisiana. It first started when I began covering a Black city councilman there who’d spent a year in federal prison for accepting a bribe in the 1990s. He insisted that he was set up, and that he’d only done what he’d seen his white counterparts do themselves.

Mosby and supporters haven’t shied away from this same argument on the media tour she’s been on over the past month, sharing her fall from grace with the likes of Roland Martin and Charlamagne tha God.

“Something like this goes beyond Marilyn Mosby,” Mosby said on The ReidOut. “If they can do this to Marilyn Mosby, who had the audacity to challenge the status quo, they can do this to anybody.”

There’s something to that. All around the country, Republican-led backlash against progressive prosecutors has been gaining more support. In many ways, it was perhaps inevitable, especially with the U.S. murder rate making its largest single-year increase in more than a century, from 2019 to 2020. Tough-on-crime messages are now back in fashion, and conservatives have seized the moment.

In Los Angeles, there have been two attempts to recall District Attorney George Gascón. A similar recall effort in San Francisco unseated Boudin. In Philadelphia, the GOP-led state House in Pennsylvania attempted—and ultimately failed—to impeach Krasner. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended two prosecutors, including a Democrat who was the only Black woman serving as a local prosecutor in Florida.

“Look what happened to those people. Recalls. Really well-funded challenges. Defeats. Prosecutions,” said Musgrove, who’s written and lectured extensively about the tradition of systemic harassment of Black public officials. “What you’re really talking about is an interracial group of reform DA’s, who, the moment that popular pressure in the street eased up, got punched in the mouth.”

Given that landscape, it’s not much of a surprise that Mosby eventually found herself in legal and political peril. Her personal life has also taken a toll: She and Nick Mosby announced they would be getting divorced last summer. When I heard that, I couldn’t help but think back to the public stressors that the New York Times Magazine highlighted as putting pressure on the Mosby union. “The government is not happy with the dissolution of my marriage, the dissolution of my political career, but they’re still coming after me,” Mosby said on the Roland Martin Unfiltered show.

In recent months, Mosby has turned to the old fan base that still remembers her as the swashbuckling prosecutor who dared to take on Baltimore’s crooked cops. She’s collected more than $46,000 from an online fundraiser. She’s gathered more than 79,000 signatures on a petition asking for a pardon from the Biden administration. She’s visited news shows targeted at Black audiences, a smart play in a year when Biden will need their robust support in what’s sure to be a tight presidential election. But in the most basic sense, Mosby was just trying to stay out of jail and keep her house. After her sentencing hearing Thursday, in a grim bit of irony, Mosby addressed the media and her supporters outside of the courthouse. “[God] has touched the heart of this judge and allowed me to go home to my babies,” she said.

Through a representative, I asked Mosby if there was anything to learn about the difficulty of police reform from her plight, if it’s still a reasonable goal in this hostile political climate.

She responded with the following statement: “Yes, it’s possible if we, as a community, understood the power to set the agenda for our vote in an election year. The fact that Donald Trump has come out and stated that he has every intention to allow police officers to kill (‘us’) with impunity, should be our call to action but unfortunately, it’s not. Police and justice reform must be at the top of the agenda for Black people in this country.”

Hers was a surprisingly hopeful tone, an echo of the young prosecutor I once watched give that speech on those steps. I just wonder how many more like her will be willing to carry on this struggle. After all, they can see what it cost her.