Last year on Memorial Day weekend, a 21-year-old Brooklyn woman was arrested and accused of drunk-plowing her boyfriend's parents' Benz right through a 96-year-old woman's Long Island home. It later turned out that her allegedly intoxicated boyfriend Dan Sajewski convinced Sophia Anderson to switch seats with him and take the blame for the crash. Now, Anderson has been granted “conditionally dismissed” charges from the incident. And she and her lawyer are blaming everything on the seductive, sin-filled Brooklyn "hipster lifestyle."
“She’s doing great...without the negative influences of Daniel and the allure of Brooklyn,’’ said her lawyer John LoTurco. He said that Anderson needs to stay out of trouble for six months as part of her deal—which shouldn't be that hard now that she's living with her mom in Connecticut. “The allure of Brooklyn was her boyfriend’s circle of friends and the hipster lifestyle that was going on at that period of time — the drinking, the drugging,” LoTurco added.
Sajewski was arrested in September and charged with a DWI because he "was driving and he switched places with" Anderson; Anderson's DWI charge was dropped, though she was then charged with obstruction of justice. She admitted she lied to cops because Sajewski convinced her to take the rap; he had a criminal record and was on probation at the time.
And hoo boy, there were a lot of things he could have been on probation for: he was convicted of marijuana possession in Brooklyn in 2010 and for selling Ecstasy in Southhampton in 2009. He has two cases pending in Nassau County, including a petty larceny charge from August 2009 and charges from October 2009 for marijuana possession, driving while using a cell phone and driving without a license. And in June, he was briefly jailed for failing to complete mandated community service from a prior disorderly conduct conviction (which involved him wielding a gravity knife and riding between a D train's subway cars in Harlem).
In exchange for taking the heat from the accident, Sajewski had promised Anderson a Hamptons vacation and said he would pay for her lawyer. Neither of those things happened. Now, Anderson has forsaken her partially-shaved head look and has a clear attitude about the accident:“ [It] was awful, but I’ve learned a large lesson — a few of them,’’ she said in court. Even better: she's attained "ex-hipster" status in the NY Post! Now if she really wanted to make the best of the situation, she should start writing her harlequin romance novel, "Seduced By Brooklyn: In The Borough Of Sin."
