I'm going to add a couple of details of a non-contentious sort for the sake of those trying to make sense of things from afar. One is that Brozman was born to a very wealthy family, his father was among the richest real estate developers in Manhattan. Bob has alway been a multi-millionaire, with emphasis on the "multi" part. As to civil suits against the estate, one imagines that such may happen, but of course things of this sort can take years and years, and even at the conclusion the terms may not be public. I hope that people are not suggesting that we all wait for the outcome of any and all such cases before talking about the allegations.

The picture of Brozman as being in great pain, and especially as having sunk into some sort of suicidal despondency, does not square with known facts. He had just returned from Japan, from what I've hear, and people who saw him there saw the same Bob they knew, full of energy and apparent good spirits. A musician friend of mine who knew him very well spoke to him within 2 or 3 weeks of his death and said Bob sounded as upbeat as ever. He also pointed out that, over all the years he knew Brozman, he never took pain medicine stronger than ibuprofen (though this may have changed in very recent times, I wouldn't know). The decision to end his life would seem to have been very sudden and certainly no one outside his immediate family had any warning. This is offered not as evidence of anything so much as to give a picture. Could he have been hiding his despondency? Well, either that or he was hiding something else, and while I believe it was something else, both scenarios are pretty unbelievable to me.

To been very clear on the last - only one person I've spoken to has even said that he heard rumors about the allegations during Bob's life, and that person didn't believe them at the time. Bob was in any case a highly strung and sometimes difficult individual, and it's not as if everyone in the business loved the guy. The same could be said of many other people, present company included, so the individual who heard the rumors chalked it up to someone having bad feelings about Brozman. But he no longer does. He, like myself and all the other musicians with whom I've communicated, was shocked and saddened by news of the death, confused by the suicide, found the version of the story about the suicide being because of despondency over losing the use of his hands unbelievable on the face of it, confirmed that the persons making the allegations were who they say they are, and came to the conclusion that the allegations are true. None of us are happy about this, obviously, it has upset us all and caused some sleepless nights and we are each trying to deal with it in our own way.

But if it is difficult to comes to terms with the idea that someone we have known, hung out with, picked tunes with, swapped jokes with and thought was "one of us" was a sexual predator, what about the people he violated, the families he dropped bombs on, the innocent girls whose lives he damaged? That really can be the only focus, now.

I think I've added all that I can at this point.

Duck Baker