Antonio Brown Pleads Guilty to Aggravated Assault With a Firearm, Gets Three Years of Probation in the Miami Shooting
The former NFL receiver pleaded guilty Friday to the reduced charge from a May 2025 shooting outside a celebrity boxing match. He faced up to 30 years on an attempted murder charge; instead he leaves court with probation, weekly counseling and a ban on possessing a firearm.
Former NFL wide receiver Antonio Brown pleaded guilty on Friday to aggravated assault with a firearm, resolving the case that began with a shooting outside a celebrity boxing match in Miami in May 2025. Judge Marisa Tinkler Mendez sentenced the 38-year-old to three years of probation, with conditions that include weekly counseling sessions and not possessing a firearm, the Associated Press reported.
The plea is to a sharply reduced charge. Brown was initially charged with attempted murder after police say he grabbed a handgun from a security staffer at the event and fired two shots at a man he had been in a fistfight with earlier; Sporting News reported the man was grazed in the neck. On the original charge, Brown's attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, said, he faced a thirty-year prison sentence, including a twenty-year mandatory minimum. "The prosecutors offered to reduce the charge and allow him to serve probation without a conviction," Eiglarsh said in a statement issued to ESPN. "Given the stakes, it was an offer we couldn't refuse." If Brown meets all the terms, NBC Sports reported, the probation could end in roughly 18 months and the felony plea would not sit on his official record.
Prosecutor Howard Rosen said in court that his office worked to reduce the sentence because it was uncertain whether Brown intentionally fired at the man, who was walking away from the altercation at the time, Sporting News reported. The case would have tested Florida's "stand your ground" law: Brown claimed self-defense, but, as NBC Sports summarized the facts prosecutors would have used, he allegedly took a guard's gun and fired after the alleged assault on him had ended and the other man had disengaged.
Brown was extradited in November 2025 from Dubai, where he has business interests, after an arrest warrant on the attempted murder charge was issued in June 2025, the AP reported. He spent 12 years in the NFL, playing for the Steelers, the Raiders — without appearing in a regular-season game — the Patriots and the Buccaneers, and Friday's plea closes the criminal case that had hung over him since the spring of 2025.
