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Pretty Lies And Alibis

RECAP: Brendan Banfield Takes The Stand

Pretty Lies And Alibis

GiGi McKelvey

True Crime, Society & Culture, Daily News, News, Documentary

4.6 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2026

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In this episode of Pretty Lies & Alibis, we break down the day Brendan Banfield finally took the stand in his murder trial, following the dramatic collapse of the defense’s private investigator under cross-examination. Prosecutors methodically challenged the PI’s claims about phone locations, FetLife activity, Telegram usage, and Gmail account creation, emphasizing that multiple devices existed in the household and that the witness could not determine who was actually operating them.

The Commonwealth highlighted key moments when Christine was active on her laptop while illicit accounts were accessed elsewhere, weakening the defense narrative.

Brendan Banfield then testified about his long marriage to Christine, their careers, family life, and their young daughter. 

Jurors were shown numerous family photos as the defense attempted to humanize him, though prosecutors objected to what they argued was repetitive emotional evidence. Banfield admitted to having an affair with the family’s au pair, Juliana, describing how it began while Christine and their daughter were out of town. He denied any planning related to Christine’s murder.

 He also walked through the morning of the killings, describing leaving early for work, stopping at McDonald’s, receiving a panicked call from Juliana about a strange man entering the house, unsuccessfully trying to reach Christine, and then driving back home.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Welcome to Pretty Lies and Alibis. Let's seek the truth and travel the long road to justice together.

0:08.4

What you know, Alibiers, welcome to another episode of Pretty Lies and Alibis. I'm Gigi.

0:13.7

Good to have you here. It's Wednesday, January 28th.

0:17.2

We finally got Brendan Banfield on the stand.

0:20.9

We're going to go through it, but first, we got to finish up with the defense private investigator, Barry Lidski.

0:26.6

He picks up going through timelines of locations of Juliana's phone at key points during the case,

0:33.6

like on the day the Gmail account was created.

0:36.6

He said her phone pinged away from the home,

0:39.4

and his opinion was Giuliana was not there. He points out Brendan's movements at times when

0:45.0

messages were sent to the FetLife account or the telegram account. They give one example. He was

0:50.8

at Washington-Dulles Airport. This goes on for way too long. We're not going to dive in,

0:56.5

so let's keep going. They show messages sent where someone is pretending to be Christine sending

1:01.6

messages that would be very consistent with somebody on a Fet Life account. They show that

1:06.9

bathing suit photo that Christine took in the mirror on January 17th, which is on the same day,

1:13.5

that photo was put on FetLife. And they showed Brendan's phones were not home when the FetLife account

1:18.8

was created. On the morning of February 13th, there were outgoing message from Christine's device

1:24.7

to someone on FetLife. We just go over this, and I mean, we know who sent those messages.

1:29.4

If Brendan wasn't home, it was Juliana and vice versa.

1:32.7

He shows some vacation planning that Brendan and Christine were doing.

1:37.1

Someone initiated a password change on FetLife the night before the murders at 11 p.m.

1:43.1

And they point out, Juliana's device was accessing

1:46.0

Netflix at that time. So wonder who that would be. Allegedly, Brendan. On cross, it took the

...

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