Alvin Bragg

On September 14, 2026, a county prosecutor in New York announced what his office called the largest known seizure of AI-generated celebrity deepfake websites to date. Twelve domain names, gone by court order, taken down because roughly 1,200 real people — overwhelmingly women, mostly public figures — had their faces and bodies stolen and turned into illegal pornography without their knowledge or consent.¹ That prosecutor was Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney, and the announcement was easy to miss beneath the weight of the name he is famous for prosecuting: Donald Trump. But the deepfake takedown, followed nine days later by the sentencing of Harvey Weinstein and the return of $5 million in looted antiquities to Syria, tells you more about what Bragg’s second term has actually become than the 34 felony counts ever will.¹²³

From Harlem to the DA’s office

Bragg grew up in Harlem and became Manhattan’s first Black district attorney when he took office in 2022, after serving as the state’s chief deputy attorney general and as a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York.⁴ His first day brought the memo that defined his first year: guidance to staff outlining lenient charging policies, including downgrading some felonies to misdemeanors — the frequently cited example being armed robbery committed with a toy gun. Police unions branded him soft on crime and waged open war on the policies; some were walked back quickly.⁴

His defenders would say the record bore out a different story. On taking office, Bragg created the office’s first Special Victims Division, pulling the intimate partner and sexual violence bureau, the child abuse bureau, and the human trafficking and elder abuse units under one structure staffed with investigators, analysts, and social workers.² And by the end of his first term, he was pointing to numbers: shootings down 66 percent, homicides down 48 percent across Manhattan.⁴

The Trump case

The case that made Bragg a household name was the only one of Donald Trump’s four criminal cases to reach a trial.⁵ A Manhattan jury convicted Trump on May 30, 2024, on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records — prosecutors argued he mislabeled reimbursements to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees to hide Cohen’s $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels in the closing weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denied wrongdoing and maintained the payments were properly categorized.⁵

The defense was led in court by Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, the two lawyers Trump would later tap for top posts in his Justice Department — after which Trump hired a new appellate team from Sullivan & Cromwell, led by co-chair Robert J. Giuffra Jr., to challenge the verdict.⁵ Sentencing fell to Justice Juan Merchan, who on January 10, 2025 — ten days before Trump’s inauguration — imposed an “unconditional discharge”: the conviction stayed on the books, with no jail, probation, fine, or other punishment.⁵ Trump appeared by video, called the case a “political witch hunt” and an embarrassment to New York, and vowed to appeal — which his lawyers did, asking a mid-level appeals court to overturn the verdict and erase the record that made him, as the AP put it, the only convicted person to become president.⁵ That appeal remains pending, and because the case was tried in state court, a presidential pardon cannot touch it.⁵

Re-election and the mental-health turn

On November 4, 2025, Bragg won a second term with about 74 percent of the vote, defeating Republican Maud Maron and independent candidate Diana Florence.⁴ He told the Daily News afterward that voters had credited him less for the Trump headlines than for the drop in shootings and homicides — and he named his second-term priority plainly: the mental illness crisis and how the justice system responds to it.⁴

The office’s numbers give the agenda shape. It brought 6,400 shoplifting prosecutions in a year while building a Pathways division — prosecutors embedded in the trial bureaus to flag people who would benefit from alternatives to jail. Bragg has backed a bill co-sponsored with state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal that would connect people charged with low-level offenses whose cases are dismissed with psychiatric treatment and temporary and long-term housing. Money for outreach comes from millions seized from banks, aimed at homeless people and people facing low-level charges tied to poverty.⁴ “The north star is public safety,” he said, “that starts with prosecutions. It also includes… our navigators and mental health interventions — it all advances public safety, reduces recidivism.”⁴

September 2026: the enforcement burst

The second term’s clearest statement arrived in a two-week span in September 2026.

First, the deepfake seizure. The office’s Cyber Crime Bureau took 12 domain names selling non-consensual “deepfake” videos — sites almost exclusively dedicated to AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery, built with AI tools that turned existing photos and videos of real people into hyper-realistic sexual content. The victims were overwhelmingly women and primarily public-facing: actors, politicians, athletes, musicians, social justice advocates, influencers.¹ Bragg credited a single survivor who came forward with images of herself on one of the sites: “We would not be here if it wasn’t for the courage of a survivor.” The investigations remain ongoing, and the office said it would keep monitoring for the sites reappearing under new domains.¹

Nine days later, on September 23, came the Weinstein sentencing. The office had secured a trial conviction in June 2025 in People v. Harvey Weinstein for the criminal sexual act against Miriam Haley; prosecutors asked for 20 years, and the court imposed 15. Bragg’s statement outside the courtroom centered the survivors: “Ms. Haley, her remarks were powerful, moving, and eloquent. I thank her first and foremost, and all of the survivors who came to lend their support.”²

That same day, his office announced the return of 36 antiquities — collectively worth more than $5 million — to the people of Syria. The haul included a monumental stone relief looted from Palmyra and 14 mosaics looted from a Syrian Roman villa, part of 31 Middle Eastern and North African pieces allegedly trafficked into New York by Georges Lotfi, a Lebanese pharmacist turned antiquities trafficker who is the subject of a 2022 arrest warrant and a 2023 INTERPOL Red Notice. Thirteen of the pieces were seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art — one of 402 antiquities the office has seized from the Met since 2017, valued at $98.7 million. The office’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit has now recovered more than 6,400 cultural treasures worth $495 million and returned over 6,200 of them to 40 countries.³

Criminalizing wage theft

A month earlier, on August 20, 2026, Bragg signed a memorandum of understanding with the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection — under Commissioner Samuel A.A. Levine and Mayor Zohran Mamdani — to pool information and coordinate strategy on worker exploitation, wage theft, housing violations, and fraud targeting immigrants. The practical consequence: conduct previously subject only to civil penalties can now be referred for criminal investigation and prosecution by the DA’s office. Bragg, who established a worker protection unit in 2023, said criminal enforcement in wage-theft cases turns on scale — duration, number of affected employees — and whether intimidation or retaliation was involved. The office has also expanded its white-collar footprint with a Housing & Tenant Protection Unit.⁶

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not take a position on the wisdom or legality of the Trump prosecution — it reports the verdict, the sentence, and the pending appeal as matters of public record. It does not assert the outcome of Trump’s appeal, which is unresolved. It does not claim Bragg’s first term was uniformly successful or uniformly soft on crime; both claims are made by his supporters and critics, and the record contains evidence cited by each side. It does not assert facts about the Daniel Penny prosecution or the Eric Adams federal case, which were not covered by the sources read for this profile. And it does not claim the September 2026 seizures and sentencings ended the underlying crimes — the DA’s office itself describes the deepfake investigations as ongoing.

References

Footnotes

1. Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, “Manhattan D.A.’s Office Seizes Domains Of 12 Illegal Websites Selling AI-Generated ‘Deep Fakes,’” September 14, 2026, https://manhattanda.org/manhattan-d-a-s-office-seizes-domains-of-12-illegal-websites-selling-ai-generated-deep-fakes/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, “D.A. Bragg Statement On Sentencing Of Harvey Weinstein,” September 23, 2026, https://manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-statement-on-sentencing-of-harvey-weinstein/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, “D.A. Bragg Announces Return Of 36 Antiquities To The People Of Syria,” September 23, 2026, https://manhattanda.org/d-a-bragg-announces-return-of-36-antiquities-to-the-people-of-syria/ ↩ ↩²

4. Behavioral Healthcare Network (carrying Daily News reporting), “After winning a second term, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg to focus on mental illness crisis,” November 5, 2025, https://www.bhnet.org/20495/after-winning-a-second-term-manhattan-da-alvin-bragg-to-focus-on-mental-illness-crisis/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

5. Associated Press via Hindustan Times, “Donald Trump seeks to erase felony record with hush money conviction appeal,” January 30, 2025, https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/donald-trump-seeks-to-erase-felony-record-with-hush-money-conviction-appeal-101738169896860.html ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Mayer Brown via Mondaq, “New York City’s Department Of Consumer Worker Protection And Manhattan District Attorney’s Office Partner On Consumer Protection And White Collar Enforcement,” September 22, 2026, https://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/white-collar-crime-anti-corruption-fraud/1846054/new-york-citys-department-of-consumer-worker-protection-and-manhattan-district-attorneys-office-partner-on-consumer-protection-and-white-collar-enforcement ↩