It’s no Hollywood hotel, but the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, New York, has housed several celebrities and high-profile figures, including Fetty Wap, R. Kelly and Jeffrey Epstein. Sean “Diddy” Combs, Luigi Mangione and Sam Bankman-Fried are currently being held at the facility. But despite the jail’s roster of wealthy and famous inmates, it has earned a reputation for having harsh conditions. Former inmate Brad Rouse, who served one year behind bars, exclusively tells In Touch about his experience at MDC.

“One reason it’s so famous is just because it’s the detention facility for the Southern District of New York. There are a lot of big cases there. It’s New York City, a lot of high-profile finance cases,” Rouse tells In Touch Investigates’ Kristin Thorne. “A lot of people come from all over the world to New York City, and many of them break the law. You know, I broke the drug laws back in 2008, and I pled guilty to a drug conspiracy.”

Rouse, a graduate of Harvard University, says he “had never been to jail” before MDC and had never broken the law prior to his guilty plea.

“So it’s intense because you have a lot of people who’ve done all kinds of … broken the law in all kinds of different ways from all over the world, compressed in a tight space,” he adds. “New York City real estate is small, and so are the jails, and so just, you know, the pressure and the physical reality of New York City gives it a lot of its challenges, a lot of its drama.”

Rouse says that although he “didn’t have any celebrities” in his unit, he did have some “high profile cases.”

“But you know, for me, I lived in a single room with 120 people from all over the world, and we are in a single room, no cells, just [a] warehouse there in Brooklyn, in Sunset Park, Brooklyn,” he explains.

While there may have been occasional “excitement” for a celebrity at the jail, Rouse says that he and his fellow inmates, no matter who they were, all lived “in the same rules.”

“I would advise anybody, no matter how rich and powerful they were, to go in there and plan to treat everybody as an equal, everybody with respect, because looking down on people, whether it’s the inmate in the bunk next to you, or the warden who works there, looking down on people, having expectations that you would have in the real world, it’s not a hotel,” he says.

It certainly doesn’t have the reputation of a high-profile hotel. It has often been reported as having unsanitary conditions, poor security, violence among inmates and inadequate medical care. In 2024, U.S. District Judge Gary R. Brown even cited MDC’s “dangerous, barbaric conditions” when sentencing a defendant to nine months’ incarceration, promising to vacate the sentence if he was sent to the NYC jail, according to The Appeal.

For Rouse, the best way to get through living with 100-plus people for a year was to get into a routine.

“I found a way to eat as healthy as possible. I got up early. I had a little task to do. I wiped down the glass surfaces on the unit. I exercised,” he says, advising current inmates at MDC to do the same.

“There’s a day in the future where you’ll be back, living at home, living in your community, interacting face to face with the people you love,” he says while giving advice to inmates at the jail. “Try to put yourself on a trajectory to come out in the best possible shape. You know, because there’s a lot of despair, a lot of rage and a lot of reckoning going on. You might have one guy on your left that’s going home tomorrow, and one guy on your right who is just sentenced to life in prison. What can you do to create peace, create healthy energy around you and move through to the end?”

Rouse continues, “And if there was harm done, if there’s harm in your story, I advise everyone to try to reckon with that in an honest way, consider the victims, the harm done to them, you know, try to take responsibility and make amends for that harm, accept whatever consequence is part of that atonement process, but always aim to come through with a heart that’s peaceful.”

He concludes, “We have to use that time. Your life is not on hold when you’re in that government building, in that facility, in the penalty box.”