A North Hollywood man who convinced his young victims he was a space alien recruiting them for a utopian society in a faraway galaxy was sentenced to 20 years in state prison Friday for molesting two 13-year-old girls.

Barry A. Briskman, 59, already is serving a 10-year sentence in Nevada for using the same elaborate ruse to seduce a 12-year-old runaway, prosecutor Steven J. Ipsen said.

“The techniques he used were the same used to convince adults to buy swampland in Florida,” Ipsen said. The girls, he added, all came from broken homes and were especially vulnerable to Briskman’s stories.

According to court records, from mid-1990 through early 1991, Briskman claimed to be an alien from the planet Cablell, recruiting a “team” of girls with superior beauty and intelligence for a female-dominated utopian society led by a Queen Hiternia, who was based atop the Tropicana hotel in Las Vegas.


But first, he told the victims, they had to double their IQs and break down their “sub-cons,” or subconscious intelligence barriers.

“It began with strip poker to break down our sub-cons,” one victim recalled. Later, she said, they had intercourse so he could inject the Earth girls with “IRFs"--immunities to ward off space diseases during their travels in his spaceship, parked at Lake Tahoe.

After each encounter, Briskman convincingly dialed “Andy,” the Cablellian computer, model Andrak 4000. The computer gave readouts of the girls’ sub-con and IRF levels. Once they acquired 100 IRFs, they were ready for space travel.

“He’s a classic pedophile,” said Detective John Vannerson of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Sexually Exploited Child Unit. “He spins a magical tale of seduction.”


“I don’t feel like I was the smartest of people for going along,” conceded one of the victims, a former child actress. “He led me to believe many, many things. I wanted to believe them,” she told Superior Court Judge Kathryne Ann Stoltz in Van Nuys.

“It’s mental rape,” she explained. “He manipulated us. He brainwashed us. He started out gradually and it just kept going and going. It was the Energizer Bunny. I didn’t know I was going to have sex with him when I started. It was a team and we were going to be best friends.”

Ipsen and the two 18-year-old victims had urged Stoltz to sentence Briskman to the maximum term--nearly 33 years in state prison. But the judge set sentence at 20 years--to run concurrently with the Nevada sentence--because he had agreed to plead guilty Thursday to 14 counts of sexually molesting minors.

The plea caught Ipsen and the girls by surprise. Although Stoltz had been ready to sentence Briskman on Thursday, one of the victims pleaded with her to wait another day so the other victim could be present.


Balding, gangly and pale with a fringe of white hair and thick glasses, Briskman sat with his back toward his victims while both gave heart-wrenching statements.

One was ready to move on, if not to forgive and forget. The other was not.

“One of these days, when you come to grips with what happened, I hope peace comes to you,” said the first, as Briskman turned and their eyes locked.

“He’s a hairy, gross, perverted old man and he just makes me so sick,” said the other, sobbing. “I never had a father in my life. I trusted him as a father figure and he betrayed that trust. Now I’m afraid of people. I’m afraid of men. I don’t like to talk about how I feel, and I feel absolutely crazy--mostly because of him. I just don’t know anything anymore.”


“It was a highly unusual and bizarre case,” Stoltz observed Friday, ordering Briskman to pay $10,000 in restitution. “The pain and anguish of the victims has reverberated in this courtroom. . . . I think it affected everyone here, including Mr. Briskman.”

The judge praised the girls for having the courage to come forward with their story, knowing adults might disbelieve them. Their tales of molestation here led authorities in Nevada to prosecute Briskman. Prosecutors in Van Nuys pressed forward with the charges here because Briskman could be paroled in Nevada as early as December.