Bryan Betancur received a four-month sentence for taking part in the Jan. 6 insurrection, an offense for which President Donald Trump later pardoned him along with others.
Now, a judge ruled Friday, he must avoid all D.C.-area Metro stations for allegedly touching women’s hair on trains while filming himself doing it.
The ruling by Magistrate Judge Renee Raymond at the D.C. Superior Court comes about two weeks after videos began circulating on X, showing a hand reach over a train seat to feel women’s hair. That hand, detectives with the Metro Transit Police Department said, belonged to Betancur, a Maryland resident whom the FBI has called a “self-professed white supremacist” with violent tendencies.
Betancur, 28, is now facing multiple charges for assault in Washington and Arlington, Virginia.
The series of hair-touching offenses began around late February, according to court documents. A post on X flagged by a member of Metro’s social media team warned of a man who “stalks women in the D.C. area,” secretly snapping pictures of their feet and touching their hair.
Attached to the post was a video posted by an account that police say belongs to Betancur. It showed a woman with blond hair sitting and texting on the train. Several seconds in, a hand emerges from behind and lightly grasps a few strands then stops, only to appear once again and retreat when the woman looks up from her phone.
In a caption, Betancur allegedly wrote: “Blondes are a good adventure and yeah she gave me permission Lol.”
Later that evening, that same account started a live stream on X, filming as Betancur boarded a New Carrollton-bound train at the Virginia Square station in Arlington, police allege in a court filing. Minutes into the live stream, a hand reached to touch the hair of a woman sitting in the seat in front of him at least twice, police say.
Detectives tracked down the woman the following day.
“I remember this guy,” she said, according to the court filing. “He asked me for directions to Metro Center.”
Betancur denies committing either of those crimes, and his attorneys in either case could not immediately be reached for comment Saturday.
Police said they later discovered that Betancur had been arrested on Jan. 17, 2021 — 11 days after he was photographed holding a Confederate flag while standing on scaffolding erected at the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.
Federal prosecutors charged Betancur with disorderly conduct for joining others who stormed the building. He initially claimed he was handing out Bibles but later confessed that was a ruse created to get permission to leave Maryland while on probation for another crime. He pleaded guilty to the federal charge.
In court filings for that case, an FBI agent called Betancur “a self-professed white supremacist” who had researched mass shootings, aspired to be a “lone wolf killer” and engaged with “racially motivated violent extremist groups on the internet.”
Betancur was sentenced to four months in prison. Along with about 1,500 other people convicted in connection with the violent insurrection, he was pardoned by Trump last year.
Amanda Moore, a freelance journalist who covers the far-right fringe, said she is familiar with Betancur, whom she first encountered in 2024 at a “Take Our Border Back” convoy in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Worried for her safety after feeling threatened by Betancur, Moore said, she began tracking his online activity. And to her, the recent posts felt like an escalation.
“He’s really emboldened,” she said. “He’s got this pardon, you know, and it’s like, he’s feeling great.”
On March 2, police heard from one of the women whose hair Betancur allegedly touched. She said she boarded a Red Line train at the NoMa Metro station around 11:40 p.m. a few days earlier, according to court records. The woman told police “she did not consent to being touched” and that her ride on the Metro began and ended in the District, the filing said. She also provided police with screenshots of the text exchange visible in the video that was circulating online.
Surveillance footage captured Betancur leaving the train car the woman was traveling in at the Silver Spring stop. He was wearing the same black jacket police allege he wore the next day during the offense on a Metro train in Virginia.
The Metro Transit Police Department shared a wanted poster with Betancur’s photo on X and said they needed the public’s help to find him.
About two hours after the post went up, the department heard from Betancur’s mother, according to court documents. She wanted police to come to the apartment she shares with her son and arrest him. When officers arrived at the apartment building in Silver Spring, Betancur was waiting for them outside, police wrote in the documents.
Betancur was held in custody in Maryland, where he appeared through a screen days later at a bail review hearing at the Montgomery County District Court in Rockville. Betancur’s mother and Moore sat in the gallery on opposite sides of the room.
“I’m a little concerned about the allegations against you,” said Associate Judge Eric John Nee, who presided over the hearing.
“I touched someone’s hair,” Betancur shouted quickly.
After the ruling, Betancur’s mother declined to comment.
Betancur was sent to Virginia on March 5, according to online court records, and released four days later. As he walked out of the Arlington County courthouse, Metro police were there to arrest him again in connection with the hair-touching incident in D.C.
At his arraignment in D.C. on Friday, Betancur wore a thin black jacket and gray hoodie with khaki pants. His eyes danced around the courtroom as he approached the bench with shackles locked around his hands and feet.
Betancur’s defense attorney asked the judge for his client to be released.
Raymond, the judge, obliged but ordered that he stay away from Metro stations and that he not possess a weapon.
She ruled Betancur be released on GPS monitoring and return to court Monday for a review hearing.
After being fitted for an ankle monitor, Betancur walked out of the courthouse and repeatedly raised his right fist in the air, in a video captured by Moore.
“I am innocent of anything they say, and feminism is a cancer,” he said.
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