Bryan Betancur, pardoned for a Jan. 6 Capitol breach, was arrested in Virginia on assault charges after investigators said he recorded himself touching a woman’s hair on Metro.
Arlington County Sheriff’s Office deputies took Bryan Betancur into custody Thursday when the 29-year-old Silver Spring, Maryland, man appeared in a Virginia court. He had come to seek dismissal of a pending assault and battery charge. He left under arrest instead.
Authorities charged him with assault in a March Metro case and with failure to appear for an earlier hearing this year. Investigators said he posted social-media videos of himself stroking the hair of women seated in front of him on trains in the Washington area, including a Silver Line train in Arlington. He had been treated as a fugitive since early March.
The New York Times reported the arrest and the string of cases that followed his presidential pardon for breaching restricted areas at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Betancur’s Virginia arrest came two days after another jail stint ended. A Washington, D.C., judge found him guilty in August of a similar crime. He served nearly 170 days and walked out of a D.C. jail on Tuesday.
By Thursday he was back in handcuffs in Arlington. The public defender’s office representing him in the Virginia matter declined to comment on Friday. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the new charges.
The Metro allegations fit a longer pattern of cases involving women, court orders, and probation trouble in the District and nearby suburbs.
At the time of his Jan. 6 pardon in January 2025, Betancur was already on probation in Washington. Court records show he had been charged in 2024 with three counts of contempt for violating an anti-stalking order. He pleaded guilty to two of those counts in September 2024.
Officials said his probation was revoked in May 2025 after he posted a video in which he threatened to assault another woman. He was charged again in Washington with contempt in March 2025 and in June of this year in separate cases. One of those matters was dismissed.
That record left local courts handling a defendant who kept cycling through orders, pleas, and new allegations, even after the Capitol case was wiped away by a blanket pardon.
Betancur previously pleaded guilty to breaching restricted areas at the Capitol. He was sentenced to four months in prison and a year of supervised release. He finished both before President Trump returned to office in January 2025 and issued the pardon that overturned the conviction.
An F.B.I. special agent, Alexis Brown, wrote in a criminal complaint that social-media photographs showed Betancur on scaffolding on the western side of the Capitol holding a Confederate flag. In a video, the agent wrote, he flashed an “OK” sign that the agent described as a gesture used by white supremacists. Authorities said he was also wearing a shirt with the name of the Proud Boys on it.
Law enforcement officials have described Betancur as a self-professed white supremacist. Before Jan. 6, court records show, he was already the subject of bench warrants in Maryland for probation violations tied to a fourth-degree burglary conviction. He asked a parole or probation supervisor for leave to travel to Washington to distribute Bibles. The request was granted with a tracking device required.
The live issue now is not the old Capitol docket. It is whether Betancur faces full accountability for conduct on public transit that investigators tied to video evidence and for skipping court when he was supposed to answer the Virginia case.
Deputies did not have to chase him across state lines on Thursday. He walked into the Arlington courthouse on his own, still trying to clear the pending assault and battery count. The failure-to-appear charge and the new assault count met him there.
Women riding Metro should not have to wonder whether a man behind them is filming himself with his hands in their hair. Repeat contempt findings, a revoked probation term, and back-to-back similar cases in Washington and Virginia are the record the courts have in front of them.
Presidential pardons close specific cases. They do not license the next crime. Betancur’s latest arrest is a test of whether local prosecutors and judges treat a documented pattern against women as seriously as ordinary riders deserve.
