California downfall laid bare in Syd court
Brandi Brandt's bio in the late 1980s and early 90s was pure California dreaming: a sun-kissed Playboy covergirl who inherited her mother's taste for rock'n'roll and married a star.
On Friday she was in a court dock on the other side of the world, her long hair unkempt and her smile faded.
Brandt - best known for her failed marriage to Motley Crue bassist Nikki Sixx - is waiting to be sentenced for her 2007 role in a brazen US-Australia cocaine importation syndicate that hid packages of the drug on passenger planes bound for Sydney.
She pleaded guilty to importing a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug and dealing with proceeds of crime of more than $50,000.
It was a downfall many years in the making, Sydney's District Court heard on Friday.
Her mother, Maria 'Brie' Darling, was just 19 when she had Brandt.
She was a rocker in her own right who had no intention of letting the stage take a backseat to motherhood.
Instead she let "dysfunctional" drug addicts and near-strangers babysit little Brandi, the court heard.
"You would generally be playing in a band till very late in the morning, the middle of the night. Who looked after her?" Brandt's barrister Phillip Boulten SC asked Ms Darling.
"Friends, sometimes relatives ... sometimes people that I didn't really know," she replied.
By the time she was 12 or 13, Brandt herself had begun to abuse drink and drugs, and went off to live with her father.
Asked if her daughter had told her of boozing and "emotional abuse" at her father's home, Mrs Darling replied: "I think much later she told me, not at the time."
And then, in a small voice: "Or if she did, I didn't hear her."
After her marriage foundered in the mid-1990s, Brandt met a new beau - her co-conspirator in the coke ring, motorcycle stuntman Rusty Setser.
Ms Darling's memories of the relationship were bleak: the heroin her daughter would later confess to smoking; the time Setser kicked Brandt's dog so hard he knocked its teeth out.
It was this incident that prompted Brandt to kick him out of her childhood home.
By early 2009, US media reports began to surface linking Brandt to the cocaine scheme but it wasn't until 2013 that the now 45-year-old was extradited to Australia.
"She said it was a hard lesson to learn, but she's learned from it," Ms Darling said.
Judge Peter Zahra will hand down his sentence on August 29.
