Judge throws out sexual abuse charges against Timothy Busfield over prosecutor's conduct

Allegations against Busfield came to light in January of 2026, as the family of two children working on since-canceled Fox series The Cleaning Lady accused Busfield, who’d been working on the series as a director, of touching them inappropriately. Busfield, who surrendered himself to authorities shortly after the charges became public, and who’s been out on bail ever since, has long denied all charges involved in the case.

As noted above, the dismissal here doesn’t really rest on the facts of that case, so much as how Bernalillo County District Attorney Sam Bregman attempted to prosecute them; the judge found that Bregman hadn’t sufficiently informed members of the grand jury of their ability to call witnesses, and, once they learned of that power, allegedly invoked “an unexplained procedure and an incomplete explanation of the subpoena requirement to unilaterally withhold evidence from the grand jury.” Since the grand jury’s whole job is to decide whether prosecutors have a strong enough case to take a defendant to trial, Montano found that Bregman’s actions weren’t “in line with either the letter or the spirit of the grand jury laws,” hence the dismissal.

As noted by Deadline, this isn’t automatically the end of the case against Busfield, who’s had a number of allegations of harassment made against him over the years, none of which have ever been successfully prosecuted. (Several more came to light in March of this year, after the Cleaning Lady case became public knowledge.) Judge Montano offered Bregman and his prosecutorial team the option to “institute new criminal proceedings” against the actor, but it’s not clear if the DA will take the judge up on that offer.