Timothy Busfield Enters No Plea In First Court Appearance On Child Sex Abuse Charges
Timothy Busfield did not enter a plea today in New Mexico to charges of child sex abuse.
Looking at years in prison if found guilty, the orange jumpsuit wearing actor will remain in custody and be back in court in less than a week to fight a pre-trial motion by prosecutors to keep him incarcerated up to and including a trial.
Facing two counts of criminal sexual contact with a minor and child abuse over claims of incidents with two boys who were actors on The Cleaning Lady, Busfield surrendered himself to Albuquerque authorities on January 13, five days after an arrest warrant was issued for him and US Marshals activated. In custody at the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center after being arrested and booked, the 68-year-old Emmy winner appeared in Judge Felicia Blea-Rivera’s courtroom remotely.
All Busfield said in the less than five minutes he was before the judge was “thank you, your honor,” at the end before shuffling away to court officers.
Represented via video by attorney Amber Feryberg, Busfield did not raise a probable cause challenge against the state on the felony charges. The hearing comes less than 24 hours after Busfield declared his innocence Tuesday with “I did not do anything to those little boys.”
As detailed in the January 9 arrest warrant, Busfield told Albuquerque Police Officer Marvin Brown in a November 3, 2025 phone interview that Cleaning Lady “lead actress, Elodie Young” told him in late 2024 that “the mother of SL and VL (sic) that she wanted revenge, and I’m going to get my revenge on Tim Busfield for not bringing her kids back for the final season.”
After months of investigation by the APD to the claims of misconduct, which had primarily been about tickling and head-kissing and had seen a probe by Cleaning Lady producers Warner Bros, the accusations against Busfield took a much darker turn last Fall. The mother of the children contacted the cops again and told the APD Investigating Officer “on 09/02/2025, SL reported to his counselor that Timothy Busfield “touched his penis and bottom.”
Additionally Wednesday, as promised on January 13, Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bergman’s office filed a motion this morning to have The Cleaning Lady director remain behind bars because “no conditions of release will reasonably protect the safety of any other person or the community.” That detainment motion will have its own hearing in the coming days. To get their way, prosecutors will have to convince a district court judge that there is “clear and convincing evidence” that pretrial detention is required for public safety. Obviously, Busfield’s Larry Stein-led legal team will file an opposition to the detention motion before next week’s hearing
Earlier Wednesday, after a new decades old allegation of sexual abuse against Busfield emerged, The West Wing alum’s lawyer Stein sent out a missive of a successful lie detector test by his client. “Tim Busfield denies the allegations in the criminal complaint and maintains they are completely false,” the attorney said. “As a voluntary step, he submitted to an independent polygraph examination regarding those allegations and passed.”
Besides occurring in the past few days, as I hear, there was no additional info as to exactly when and where the test was conducted, not who administered it.
However, it is worth noting that while polygraph tests are often inadmissible in court in most states, New Mexico does permit them to be brought into a case if a judge allows it. On the other side of the country, Deadline has confirmed that US Marshals raided Busfield and wife Melissa Gilbert’s upstate New York home Tuesday after the accused actor had already put himself in police custody. There are no details yet what the feds may or may not have retrieved from the property or what they were looking for.
In the New Mexico case, two brothers born in 2014 who worked on Fox’s now-canceled The Cleaning Lady, on which Busfield helmed a number of episodes and served as an EP between 2022 and 2024, are claiming the thirtysomething actor repeatedly touched them inappropriately and sexually. One of the boys, referred to as SL, graphically told APD Officer Marvin Brown, who wrote up the dense warrant after a months of investigation starting in late 2024, that Busfield touched his “penis and buttocks, masking it as play” on more than one occasion. To be clear, what SL said directly was that Busfield put his hands on the boy’s “‘poop’ and ‘pee’ area.”
As well as the claims from the two 2014-born boys (referred to as “SL” and “VL” in the arrest warrant) who starred on the Albuquerque filmed and now-canceled Élodie Yung-led Fox drama over multiple seasons before being let go for having aged out of the role, Busfield has also been accused in two previous sexual assault allegations in 1994 and 2012. A journeyman on the big and small screen since appearing in 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds, the actor was never charged in those cases. The claims respectively involved a 17-year-old girl and a 28-year-old woman. In the case of the teenager, Busfield did make a payout of $150,000 over legal fees in his unsuccessful defamation countersuit.
Today’s hearing saw Busfield’s case come up before the judge after dozens of other criminal cases, some in person, some remotely, in a very full docket.
