Hollywood Tragedy! Marlon Brando’s Son Christian’s 1990 Arrest For Shooting His Sister’s Lover In The Head
Jan. 19 2022, Published 5:18 p.m. ET
The fire department was first to arrive at actor Marlon Brando’s mountaintop mansion in the Hollywood Hills and was met with a remarkably normal family scene — a guy lying on the couch appearing to channel surf. Except he wasn’t. The TV was flipping channels all by itself. And the man was dead, a single bullet hole just below his left cheekbone.
The police arrived shortly afterward, and Brando’s then-32-year-old son, Christian, by his ex-wife Anna Kashfi, explained that it had all been a terrible accident. Apparently, his half-sister Cheyenne had told him that evening, May 16, 1990, that Dag Drollet — Cheyenne’s Tahitian boyfriend and father of her unborn child — had been slapping her around. Angry and upset, Christian said he confronted Drollet with a .45 caliber handgun in an attempt to shake him up. But something went wrong when Drollet attempted to wrestle the gun away from Christian, and it went off in Drollet’s face.
Police arrested Christian on the spot, but not before confiscating his arsenal of weapons, which included a .44-caliber carbine, a shotgun, a MAC-10 machine pistol, an M-14 assault rifle and what they thought was a silencer. His father didn’t help matters with his comments to police, who quoted him as saying that Christian “always had a very bad temper and could be explosively violent when angry.”
Two days after his arrest, Christian was arraigned on the charge of first-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty. Civil rights attorney William Kunstler pleaded for Christian’s release on bail, even producing a letter in support from the family’s neighbor, Jack Nicholson. But Deputy District Attorney Steven Barshop refused. He believed that Drollet’s killing was clearly a premeditated murder, especially because the angle of the wound suggested that he had been shot from above rather than in a struggle.
No one witnessed the crime, although Cheyenne, Marlon and his common-law wife, Tarita Teriipaia, were in the house at the time of the shooting. But Cheyenne would be a key witness in the trial. If Drollet really had physically abused his heavily pregnant girlfriend, then maybe people could understand Christian’s rage that fateful night. It would be viewed as a crime of passion, just siblings trying to protect each other.
But LAPD Detective Andrew Monsue was confident that Drollet hadn’t even laid a finger on Cheyenne. “There was no abuse ever involved,” he asserted. Even Cheyenne’s father didn’t believe that Drollet had abused her, but he did concede that she had “psychological problems.”
Cheyenne herself told the police that the shooting was “not an accident. It was murder.” So it was no surprise that the prosecution was looking to her as an important witness. If his own sister wasn’t prepared to protect him on the witness stand, the prosecution figured they had a very strong case.
But after numerous attempts to serve her with papers naming her a material witness, Cheyenne flew to Tahiti. A few days later, she gave birth to her son, Tuki. Prosecutors felt she ran so she wouldn’t have to testify, but days later she was in a psychiatric hospital. Two suicide attempts later, a judge declared her “mentally disabled,” meaning she was no longer able to testify at her brother’s trial
