On October 19th, 2025, The Louvre became the backdrop of something straight out of a heist movie. In this series, I'll take you inside the events of that day through the eyes of the people who live them. Then I'll join the International Hunt for the Louvre duels. Heist at the Louvre, a new series from ABC Audio. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, all your favorite podcast app, or subscribe to 2020 True Crime Plus on Apple Podcasts to listen ad-free.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to 2020, The After Show. I'm Deborah Roberts, and once again, I'm just so delighted to be with you to pull back the curtain on the recording that we do. And so many of our stories involve legal issues, of course. Courtroom traumas, obviously, True Crime stories that just have lots of legal language involved. Well, today we're going to talk to our ABC News legal contributor, Brian Buckmeyer, who I have run into in the hallways plenty of times, and we've had a little quick little chats, but we haven't had a chance to talk in depth.
And today we will. Brian is host of ABC's Podcast Bad Wrap, the case against Diddy. He's joining us to help look behind the scenes of how this all kind of plays out, and to defend the people in court, somebody that's been accused of crime, navigating the moral responsibilities of his job, of course, because he's a practicing lawyer, and his message for young people on the importance of knowing your rights. So there's a lot that we're going to get to, Brian, and talking about misconceptions of criminal defense work and so forth, but it's so great just to have you here. Welcome.
Yeah, thank you for having me. Keep bumping into each other, but not longer than like 30, 45 seconds. Yeah, yeah, this is great. And you've contributed to a lot of our platforms here, and you are a lawyer. I learned more about you getting ready for this conversation, by the way, than I knew.
I mean, of course I knew you were a lawyer because you bring your legal expertise to so much of what we're doing. But I'm just really curious. I mean, we're talking about the law and, you know, for us to try to understand it, you bring in not only the expertise, but you kind of help us from a layman's perspective of understanding. And many of our stories, and in this particular case, you've been talking a lot about Diddy, talked to us a little bit about the conversations that are happening before these folks go to trial. And, you know, what you are thinking when you are sitting down talking with us about, you know, what has transpired in these cases?
Yeah, so before we go to trial, oftentimes we've learned a lot about the case, from the arrest, indictment, the motions, the arguments that are going on. But I often tell people both as a practicing attorney and someone who's on ABC, what we hear in the news is often a fraction of what we end up learning at trial, or even thereafter, oftentimes because defense attorneys don't really speak out in their case. And it's only, yeah, it's only you get that full breadth of the entire case. Can you really absorb it? And that's, I think, why a lot of judges say, don't deliberate until you get the case, don't come to any conclusion until you get the case, because it's not until you get everything that you can really formulate an idea.
Yeah. And you know about defense work because you are a defense lawyer. And tell everybody a little bit about your background and the work that you've done. Yeah. So I started in 2014 a few years ago.
I don't have to date myself too much. You were a very young young, very young, prodigy. But I was at the Legal Aid Society, which is the oldest and largest public defenders office in the country, specifically in their criminal defense practice in Brooklyn. I was a public defender in the way that you think when you watch TV and they say, if you can't afford an attorney, one will be given to you. That was me.
And I did that for a little under a decade. And my time there, I had done misdemeanors, nonviolent felonies, violent felonies, and even homicide, so I was actually on a homicide unit for, I think, the last two or three years that I was there. Any kind of trial you can think of. I've touched in one way, shape or form. I did self-defense cases, possession cases.
I liked if there was a science, like the DNA, the tracking of a cell phone. I was very intrigued in the forensics. And that's why I like working here at ABC a lot as well. Shortly after my son was born, I left the public defender's office and I kind of went full on into the media aspect through ABC and at the time I was working at Dan Abrams' Law and Crime Network. Oh, I didn't know that.
Yeah. So again, I'm learning all this stuff about you and how you came to our hallways and on our programs. Yeah, there was a time that I would represent clients like Monday through Thursday and then Thursday afternoon, I would just like scurry off to like this little studio, maybe half the size of this when Dan was starting up. And I would just comment on cases. I was on a show called Long Crime Daily as a host for a while.
We did like true crime, whether it be through sports because I also am a college athlete as well. So we kind of touched everything. And then the EP of Nightline called me up and he was like, I see you all the time when you come to ABC. And I was like, I would love to be at ABC. And that's five years ago.
Now I'm here. And here we are. The rest is history. Well, you know, what's so fascinating is that you bring a perspective, particularly from the defense world. And we cover so many stories on 2020 where people are accused of horrific things, right?
And one of the stories we've been tracking is the Rex Heurman case, the Gil-Gobeech murder case. You know, we've heard about Luigi Manjone, the guy accused and the shooting of a health care executive. Of course, Diddy accused of doing some pretty horrific things, not murder, but horrific things. And one of the things I think you bring to the set when you're talking is about the defense, because oftentimes our audience does not understand how these lawyers are defending people who, you know, are accused of pretty terrible stuff. And what are you most trying to get across when you are talking with us and sort of, you know, playing that role of what the defense lawyers may be thinking?
Yeah. So one, I often tell my wife, I don't know if I'm playing the role of defense attorney or if I'm playing the role of a human being who's not a defense attorney. It's just the way my mind works. I am what some defense attorneys would jokingly call a gold star defense attorney because I've never prosecuted before. So oftentimes, a lot of people on TV who are defense attorneys are former prosecutors.
And then they become defense attorneys. And I think that that is a good thing in the sense of they can give you both sides. They can say, yes, when I used to put someone in the grand jury, I can do this. And now's a defense attorney. But the one thing I think that's unique about being a public defender is I never had an opportunity to shift through what cases I could or couldn't take or didn't want to take.
If there was a murder on the top of that pile, I had to take it. If there was a rape on the top of that pile, I had to take it. I have a choice. That was your job. It was frowned upon to sift through.
So if there was a defense that needed to be found as a public defender, you have to do the mental gymnastics to find a defense no matter what. And for a lot of our most heinous cases, those cases are represented by public defenders, where they have to try to find a defense no matter what. But a lot of these cases where I know we are covering these folks are able to afford top notch defense attorneys. Yeah. I mean, it's so I was saying when it comes to the strength of the case, there are two things to consider.
The actual arguments that you have, and then the people who are going to receive that information. I mean, analogy that probably if you watch my ABC, you're probably sick and tired of me saying is, in high school, I was about as tall as I am now, I was like six, two, six, three, and I played both soccer and basketball on the soccer field. I was a giant, the tallest person there. But on the basketball court, I was small. Average.
Yeah. Right. My height never changed. You never ran that information, who made the assessment as to whether or not I'm tall or not. So you can get 12 people listening to one case and come back and say, you know what, Sean Combs is not guilty of racketeering conspiracy or sex trafficking and only transportation.
You could probably get another 12 people to say he's guilty of everything or another 12 people to say innocent of everything. So it depends on the people in the facts. And in our stories, often, and you know, typically for 2020, we don't cover necessarily just all celebrity cases, it can be the 21-year-old mom of two young children in Florida who is abducted and killed or any other case that just like grabs your heart. That, you know, the family has just been pleading for justice, oftentimes they're unsolved crimes. And then after 10, 15, 20 years, some new detective comes to town and sheds new light on it, but the family is always fighting for justice. They're always calling for justice. And one of the things I hear when these very
distraught distressed family members are sitting across from us is they feel like they don't really have any rights as victims. You know, it's the perpetrator who has all the rights. They're just fighting for justice. And so when we're talking about justice on the air, I mean, it looks very different to everybody. I mean, and the question becomes as a lawyer, as a legal mind, you know, justice can be kind of elusive depending on what you feel. Do you feel like for the most part,
justice is typically served when you look at the system? So maybe I'm a little jaded. I think that justice is the guiding star or light that we are all attempting to reach, whether you be a victim, a defendant, a prosecutor, a defense attorney, or a judge. Do I think we reach that more often than not? No. And the reason why I say that is because
let's talk about the missing person case or the cold case justice in my mind to be able to reunite that family member with that person to make them whole again. But the justice system can't do that, unfortunately. And so to make someone whole who's been harmed, that would be just as enough to times we can't reach that when it comes to prison times of a person. Now, take out the big one. Take up the rate murder trafficking. I think we're all on the same page there. But
selling a bag of cocaine, punching someone in self defense or not in self defense, how much time should that person get? Is that number exactly justice? Should it be getting rehabilitation for substance abuse rather than incarcerated? I think oftentimes we fall short of that. But I think it's an aspiration that we should always keep in our mind and always strive to attain.
Yeah, it's always interesting to me when I talk to family members, because some of them have found a sort of inner piece, even though they're still, you know, damaged and traumatized, but they've found a piece to be able to move on and not want necessarily retribution. And then others just want that, you know, one case I just recently covered for 2020, the family couldn't wait for this guy to be executed because he's on death row. And oftentimes other family members just want to move forward. So it's always very interesting to hear how the families interpret what's happening in the law. Well, Brian, you are just multifaceted, not only do you talk about the law, but you're also a writer and author. And I want to talk about that. So when we come back, we're going to dive into your book,
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Harris, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to 2020, the after show. We're back with Brian Buckmire, ABC's legal contributor and criminal defense attorney. You're a father, as you mentioned, of a three year old. Let's talk about being a parent because oftentimes when I'm working on these stories and I've talked to my producers and, you know, as a mom, as a wife, sometimes these stories really get me. How about you as a parent when you're reporting and also when you're
defending and doing court work? So I think it's maybe easier as a defense attorney and being a parent because I really have to compartmentalize when I'm in court. When I'm in court, I am not Brian. I'm Mr. Buckmire, the attorney. I am a piece of a system that is meant to perform in a way that if I
do my job, the judge's their job and the government is their job, we hope that we seek justice. And so oftentimes I tell people, yeah, I represent people that I don't agree with, but I do agree that they deserve representation. And so I compartmentalize myself that way. It's actually harder for me when it comes to reporting because as a reporter, I'm more an observer and I'm not an attorney who has a constitutional duty or something that I've sworn to do. It's harder for me to do the cases when I see a missing child, when I see a child or a parent crying. Even when I do interviews in the past,
one that comes to mind first is the Ammon Arbery trial. I covered that story. Yeah, and I interviewed the mother and I was even a father then but my heart just hurt speaking to her about how she had so many people not believe that this is going to be a case that was valuable that she had to keep pushing and pushing. And then now as a father, I look back on that and I was like, I don't know if I have an ounce of the courage and strength that some of these people when they have a family member who's a victim and a system that says no, and they say, I'm going to keep going. If anything, that's how it affects me. I hope that I never have to have that strength, but I hope that I
say within me if I break a call to do so. Yeah, yeah, no, I totally agree with you. And I remember sitting down across from her and my heart just cracked for her as well. I just sort of alluded to something you were saying. Sometimes you don't always agree with them. I have had cases where I've
been spat at swung at called the N word as their lawyer and I still got to get back up there and represent them. So I've how and that's why I joke sometimes with producers even here at ABC, they're like, we're so sorry. It's like, Hey, compare to the other job. That's nothing. This is nothing. Do not worry about it. I've yeah, I've gone through the litany of it. And but for me,
it is very much compartmentalizing and saying, it's about making sure that we all have this right. And if I've got to be the shield and sometimes I'm taking a hit from the front, whether it be the judge or the prosecutor, sometimes I'm taking a hit from the back from the person I'm actually trying to defend. The way I think about it, my wife, she used to be a scuba diver instructor to hire the professional diver. And she's like, Hey, sometimes you're saving someone and they're like thrashing around and they hit you. You can't just say, Hey, I'm not going to save you because you hit me. Sometimes you're like knocking over the head or like just drag them to shore. And sometimes the
people that you're saving, you can take a hit from them. But if that's your role, in my belief, you've got to be that person. And I do that oftentimes as a reporter, I mean, I'm sitting across from somebody who I think might be a little suspect about either the media or maybe about me or maybe about my race. And I've got to do my job. So I know how you feel about that. You mentioned that your father,
your also a brother, which motivated you to write a book called Come Home Safe. It's a young adult novel. And I'm just really fascinated. I mean, at first of all, I didn't know you had written the book and now I got to get it and read it. It navigates racial inequality and police brutality and what it means to not become a statistic, which is something that you mentioned in the book. Talk about how you
came to write it and what it all means because the story line sounds so interesting. Yeah, so to understand the book, you probably have to understand a little bit about me. So Caribbean family, mother Jamaican father's, Grenadian, my parents, the force when I was very young, I do have a brother and sister, but they would be, I don't call them this. They'll be my half siblings. My father remarried, my sister, my mother got engaged and had my brother, but his father is not in the picture.
There were actually children after them that I remember that passed away. So I have a brother who died of crypto and one who was stillborn. And when I was 18, if you see me on TV, you see a tattoo on my wrist, it says I am my brother's keeper because I am my brother's legal guardian. And my brother knows the story about me losing siblings. He knows why I am his legal guardian. And so after
Maude Arbery, he calls me and he said, Brian, and he crying, how do I make sure I'm not a statistics? Because I go running in my neighborhood as well, what if what happened to Arbery happens to me? Oh, that's heartbreaking. And I sat there and he kept talking as I'm crying over the phone. He said, he's going over the things that I've never thought that he accounted for. He's like,
Brian, you taught me to shave and you got me my suit when I was in high school. You're on TV. You're a lawyer. If you don't have this answer, can you at least point me to who does have the answer? Oh my gosh. And so we were 12 years apart. And I'm like, oh my god, I don't know.
And so it motivated me because of the time I married to my wife and we were trying to have a child. I'm like, if I have a son, I have to have this answer. The talk is what we call it in the Black community. Yeah. And so what I did is I started researching. I asked everyone within the criminal justice
and I can find judges, former prosecutors, current prosecutors, police officers, correction officers, court reporters, clerks of all different race. The only criteria was do you have a child who would be either mixed race or blacks or even Hispanic, whatever. That could be a target. And you're in the system. What do you tell your children? How do you explain this process to them knowing what we know? Because
if we don't have the answer being inside the system, then God help the people who are outside. And through those advice and those stories, I put together two narratives of my son and daughter going to situations where we know they're being falsely accused, but it's very clear that the evidence there could suggest that they did the crime. And they're basically taking me advice that their father, the public defender gave them as to how to navigate that. And I intentionally made it that the father and mother are not present during these situations, which is probably the hardest thing to write a story about my son going through probably one of the hardest things. And in the book, my son's name is Reed. My son's name is Reed. I just changed the spelling. And even my mother
called me crying. And she's like, oh my God, because she knew we were going to name our son Reed. She's like, if anyone touches like mom, it's a fake book. It's not real. But yeah, I wrote the story, not anything was going to get published in order to answer a question I think my son may ask me in the future. And also to just get the conversation going and people to be aware and to think about
it. It is a big question. And I think it's something that happens in so many communities. And we have to keep talking about it. You also create a card called Know Your Rights when promoting your book.
What is that all about? Yeah, so the publisher who I have to always thank Lindsay Davis because we have the same publisher, she's actually the one we were talking during the Derek Chauvin's route when I told her, oh, I'm supposed to have a weekend work on my book. She's the one that said this is something that needs to be promoted, not just for your job at forever. So thank you again, Lindsay. But the publisher is like, what about like a card? What would you give your son? And so it's a Know Your
Right but also invoke your right card. And it basically has the person's name, the parent's name, contact number, and it says things along the lines of like, I don't consent to being searched. I don't want to speak. I want my lawyer. Those affirmative statements that you would want your child, like a young teenager to say to make sure that law enforcement knows, hey, they've got a parent.
Yeah. Hey, they've got someone looking after them. If there's a question you'd be made, ask them, talk to them. Yeah, which is interesting for you as a defense lawyer because, you know, many times people talk a lot when they're arrested. And that's what winds up getting them charged and in trouble. Well, Ryan, you and I could just sit here and talk all day. But I want to get back
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Welcome back to 2020 the after show. We're back with Brian Buckmeyer ABC's legal contributor and we are talking about so much as work as a defense lawyer, his work here at ABC News and we are saturated with media as you know about violence, policing, criminal justice. I'm just really curious when you are analyzing these cases, how do you decide what you're emphasizing and when you're obviously adults, teenagers also sometimes are watching, how do you decide how you're going to present your viewpoint? I would say throughout my journey of being a legal contributor or a host of different aspects, I talked to my other colleagues and be like, how do you do this? The best way that I have come to understand how my voice works best is I imagine the camera is the mother of my client.
That they are highly involved in this case. They need to understand what's going to happen. When I'm going to potentially argue with the prosecutors and I potentially argue how the judges are going to potentially decide this and they need to be as informed as possible because someone they love is potentially going through the worst situation of their life. That's how I try to think of the case. If you hear me going back and forth, well, the defense can make this argument and this is why this is not going to work and it could work and then the prosecution and I kind of meander through it.
In my mind, I'm just thinking and I've done it thousands of times, you're not facing these charges, but your loved one is. I want to make sure that you understand this as best as I understand this because you might not be affected by this directly. If you chose to watch 2020 or News Live or Nightline, Good Morning, Marco, wherever I am, you're affected by this indirectly and you deserve to know every facet of this case. It's all about the legal system and educating us all. Well, before we go, I want to talk about some of the stories you've worked on with us.
Maybe just because of how big the stories were or maybe because they affected me, Ramon Arre, Sherry Papini, the ones and maybe just becoming more of a father and a parent. It's like a desperate search for your child or advocacy for the justice for your child. I think those ones probably hit my heart a little bit more and then oftentimes the ones where you have two maybe reasonable sides of trying to get justice as to like, is this the person that we should be getting the greatest amount of punishment for because this is horrible or is this something else? So I think those two, the Papini one was interesting and also the amount Arre still sticks with. Yeah, there are some that really get me too and I think the ones that involve either children or just family moms, desperate searches and all of that and answers that just took so long to come about.
Well, Brian, we can talk all day but I know you've got work to get to. That does it for us today on the After Show. Brian, it's so good to have you. Thank you for having me. And we thank you our listeners for choosing to spend some time with us today.
And of course, you can find 2020 on Friday nights on ABC and you can stream episodes anytime on Disney plus and Hulu. Hulu Original Series, Phoney, is now streaming on Hulu on Disney plus. My name is Sunny Cook. Ever since the accident, my mom looks different. You think your mom has been swapped out with a different woman? I know something, okay? Something's wrong.
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