An L.A. County Superior Court judge rejected a motion that sought to throw out 30 charges related to a famous music producer charged with committing numerous alleged sexual assaults, including at his Stevenson Ranch home.
With Friday’s ruling, Judge Larry Fidler advanced the case against Noel Christopher Fisher, aka “Detail,” to an August hearing date. At that point, Fisher is likely to have a trial date within 60 days of that date, according to the record set in open court Friday.
At Friday’s hearing, Fidler denied a 995 motion — an attempt to throw out a case after the preliminary hearing — filed on Fisher’s behalf by a defense attorney who joined the case last year, Andrew Flier of Levine, Flier & Flier LLP.
“We argued two big points because we filed very lengthy motions,” Flier said in a phone interview Friday, referring to a 45-page filing dated May 29 in the case record. “The first was ineffective assistance from counsel, and then the second one was that some of these counts against some of these alleged victims was insufficient to hold Mr. Fisher to answer for trial.”
Both counts were denied, which Flier said did not surprise him based on the relatively low bar for evidence at a preliminary hearing.
Flier said count 30, a sexual battery charge, was dismissed at the hearing.
Fisher, now 47, was 41 when he was first taken into custody, according to L.A. County Sheriff’s Department custody records.
He’s awaited trial at Men’s Central Jail in Downtown Los Angeles since 2020, but he was willing to waive time at a hearing Monday on the advice of his new counsel, which had criticized the work of Fisher’s previous counsel at length in his motion.
Kristina Buch and another musician, Peyton Ackley, both alleged assaults by Fisher and received restraining orders against him. A complaint filed by Buch against Detail alleged he forced her to have sex with him if she was interested in a career in the music industry.
Several more women came forward with similar claims, according to the criminal complaint Fisher was held to answer to in 2021.
In his May 29 motion, Flier listed several of the alleged victims by their initials and claims a wide range of problems he had in doing his own investigation based on missing evidence.
The amended criminal complaint against Fisher was given to Flier eight months ago, according to a motion from the District Attorney’s Office, which argued against delaying the trial any further. The motion stated the allegations against Fisher stretched from 2010 to 2018.
