The son of a British banking bigwig was allowed to take a forgiving plea deal after he was charged with beating and strangling his up-and-coming comedian girlfriend in Manhattan, The Post has learned.
New York-based comic Sienna Hubert-Ross — whose Kamala Harris impressions have gone viral on social media — said she was outraged that prosecutors let her ex Oliver Lane off with a “slap on the wrist.”
“This is a travesty of justice,” Hubert-Ross, 25, told The Post in a recent interview.
Lane — a 26-year-old Ivy League university graduate — was charged in August with choking, slapping and suffocating her with a pillow inside a Lower East Side apartment.
Hubert-Ross said she was stunned months later when prosecutors in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office told her — over her objections — that they’d be dropping the charges against Lane.
“Oliver should not be walking the streets with just a slap on the wrist, free to do this to other young women,” she said.
Lane — whose dad is a former Morgan Stanley banker who now sits on the board of a company tied to a billionaire British duke — was arrested Aug. 8 for what Hubert-Ross in a lawsuit claims was a “horrific” early morning attack in which her then boyfriend tried to kill her in a “jealous rage,” court records show.
The 6-foot-1, 165-pound accused attacker towered over the 5-foot-9, 115-pound comic as he “savagely threw her into a stove, then a bathtub, then punched her multiple times and threw her off a bed where she lost consciousness,” she alleges in the suit.
Lane had erupted at Hubert-Ross after she confronted him for sending “intimate” texts to his ex-girlfriend during a time in which he had agreed to “exclusively” date her, claims the suit, which asks for $5 million.
When Lane briefly left the room, Hubert-Ross frantically started a three-way phone call with her mom and her friend, who she texted, “r u awake. Oliver just hit me,” the suit reads.
Her mother and friend then listened in horror as Lane returned to the room and allegedly “violently slapped her across the face at full strength multiple times,” told her she was a “little child” and said he wanted to kill her, the suit continues.
The friend called 911 and police arrived to find Hubert-Ross “battered, bruised and bleeding,” according to the suit, which includes photos of extensive bruising on her body.
Lane was arrested and charged with felony strangulation and misdemeanor assault, according to court records obtained by The Post.
Hours later, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s office told a judge that the case was strong and that the alleged beating was extremely violent, according to a law enforcement source.
But Bragg’s office changed its tune months later.
During a tense December meeting at the DA’s office, prosecutors told Hubert-Ross the prosecution would not be moving forward, she said.
Lane, who had faced up to seven years in prison if convicted of the charges, would now get off scot-free under the terms of his deal if he went to therapy and agreed to a restraining order, Hubert-Ross said she learned.
“I felt betrayed and re-victimized for myself and others,” said the comedian, actress and model, who boasts 375,000 followers on Instagram.
Prosecutors felt forced to drop the felony strangulation charge because the case lacked sufficient evidence of specific physical injuries to the neck, or that Hubert-Ross lost consciousness, a DA’s office spokesperson said.
The office did not explain why it chose not to keep prosecuting the case as a misdemeanor assault.
Instead, Lane was allowed to plead guilty to making “unreasonable noise” on the condition that he go to therapy 16 times and stay away from Hubert-Ross until December 2026, court records show.
The lenient deal means that Lane is now subject to the same level of punishment as if he’d been ticketed for speeding, or parking in a handicapped space.
The deal also covers his second arrest, for allegedly breaching a restraining order by texting Hubert-Ross “please don’t call the police” the day after the reported assault — and then brazenly threatening to call the cops on her, the records say.
“Please talk to me. I’m begging you. I don’t want to have to go to the police tomorrow and report all of the damage,” Lane texted, according to a criminal complaint.
When Hubert-Ross protested the lax deal during the December meeting, prosecutors offered her a shocking partial explanation, she recalled.
Among their worries about the case was that her social media posts, which include jokes about sex, could be used to attack her credibility at a trial, she said.
“I was shocked to hear that my job as a comedian would be held against me,” Hubert-Ross said, speaking alongside Brett Gallaway, her lawyer in the ongoing Manhattan civil suit, which was filed in September.
“Nothing about this assault was funny,” she added.
Prosecutors also seemed to sympathize with Lane’s immigration status — noting that the man accused of brutally beating her could be deported if he was convicted of a serious crime, she said.
The DA’s office did not dispute Hubert-Ross’ account of the meeting, but stressed that it does not decide whether to prosecute cases based on social media posts unrelated to alleged crimes.
“In intimate-partner violence cases, we prioritize both the safety of the survivor and the safety of the community,” the spokesperson said. “Following a full investigation by our office, this resolution ensured accountability for the defendant with mandated therapy and, critically, a two-year order of protection in favor of the victim.”
Gallaway, of the firm McLaughlin & Stern, said he is now investigating why Bragg’s office offered Lane the deal despite being confident in the case at first.
“We are surprised and concerned that when presented with such clear and overwhelming evidence… that the DA’s office would be so quick to plea Mr. Lane down to a violation that is effectively the equivalent of a traffic ticket,” Gallaway told The Post.
“This is someone who allegedly beat his defenseless and frightened girlfriend to a pulp,” the lawyer added. “He did not run a red light.”
Prosecutors’ purported claim that Hubert-Ross’s sexually charged online posts impacted the case is such “horrific and backwards” logic, he said, suggesting that it might be a cover story to hide something else that transpired behind the scenes.
“A person’s profession has no bearing on their status as a victim,” he said, calling such a suggestion “the equivalent defense of saying a stripper cannot be raped.”
Gallaway believes that Lane’s lawyers likely lobbied for prosecutors’ sympathy by sending them a so-called “good-guy packet” — a stack of files that typically includes letters attesting to someone’s character.
Such letters are commonly sent in criminal cases by lawyers angling for a plea.
But Lane’s case file for his arrest is now sealed, leaving Hubert-Ross’ lawyers in the dark on whether such records exist, Gallaway said.
Hubert-Ross’ lawyers have filed a Freedom of Information request with Bragg’s office in a bid to force them to turn over any relevant files that could explain why Lane got such a favorable deal.
So far, the DA’s office has been stonewalling them, griping that it can’t turn over such documents because the case file is sealed, according to a letter viewed by The Post.
Gallaway said that he’s puzzled by why prosecutors so quickly tossed Lane’s charges despite having more witnesses than in a typical domestic violence case, which normally involves just the accuser and the alleged attacker.
In this case, Hubert-Ross had put her mother and friend on speakerphone during the alleged beating, the lawyer noted.
Gallaway added that based on his own investigation, law enforcement never interviewed a neighbor who was woken up by the late-night “loud and violent” encounter.
Lane’s father, Jonathan Lane, is a “non-executive chair” at Grosvenor, a company that runs the roughly $9 billion estate of Hugh Grosvenor, known as the Duke of Westminster.
The 34-year-old Duke is the Godson of King Charles III, a close friend of Prince William, and one of the most wealthy men in Britain. Lane’s father is not accused of any wrongdoing.
Hubert-Ross, whose mother is black and who in her comedy speaks often about her mixed-race background, called Lane’s deal “an example of rich white privilege taking priority over clear accountability.”
Lane’s lawyer in his criminal case, Scott Migden, declined to comment.
The accused attacker’s attorney in his civil case, Mitch Schuster, has touted the DA office’s decision to toss Lane’s charges in his bid to get the lawsuit tossed.
“Notwithstanding plaintiff’s hyperbolic cries of ‘choking’, ‘suffocation’, ‘attempted murder’ and the like, the manner in which DANY and criminal court elected to dispose of the criminal charges against Lane speaks for itself,” Schuster wrote in a Jan.8 legal filing.
Schuster said he couldn’t comment when reached by The Post.