The “bitcher” is back.
After a three-day absence, pretty, blonde actress Amanda Brooks — the accused hissing sibling of accused tub-slay strangler Nicholas Brooks — has returned to the audience of his Manhattan murder trial.
“No comment,” she told reporters as she joined the audience for the first time since June 13, when prosecutors said she’d snarled “awful bitch” at a female DA witness in a hallway outside the trial.
The brother and sister then exchanged a glance from across the courtroom, where Nicholas is at the defense table for his second week in the bathtub strangling and drowning of his girlfriend, swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay.
Amanda smiled. Nick met her glance, but did not smile.
Amanda, who wore a gauzy, plaid orange dress to court, is sitting in the courtroom’s second row between a young male friend and her “godmother,” Lynn Barrie — a longtime friend of the Brooks’ former Playboy model mom, Susan Paul. Barrie and her husband, Richard, said last week that the brother and sister had become very close in the years before he was charged with Cachay’s death.
Nick’s lawyer, Jeffrey Hoffman, has called the “awful bitch” accusation “ridiculous.” But prosecutors took it very seriously, alerting the trial judge the next day that the witness, Cachay pal Sharon Lombardo — a design director for Kate Spade — had picked Amanda out of a photo array.
Amanda is sitting through what is shaping up to be a dramatic day of testimony, which will include a manager at the exclusive Soho House hotel who will describe finding Cachay half dressed and fully submerged in the bathtub in Room 20 on the fifth floor back in Dec. ’10.
Another hotel staffer is slated to describe talking with the exhausted Cachay an hour before her death, and of hearing her voice and Nick’s voice in an argument in their room about 20 minutes after they checked in.
Cachay’s voice cut out abruptly, the staffer will tell jurors, according to prosecutors.