Nick Pasqual was sentenced Tuesday to 32 years to life in prison for the 2024 stabbing of his estranged girlfriend, Allie Shehorn, at her Sunland home. The sentence closed a violent domestic-violence case that had followed him from a television career into a courtroom.
Pasqual had appeared in several TV shows, including How I Met Your Mother, but the judge’s ruling turned on what prosecutors proved about the attack and what Shehorn endured after it. He was found guilty last month of attempted murder, first-degree residential burglary with a person present, and injuring a spouse, cohabitant, fiancé, boyfriend, girlfriend or child's parent after prosecutors said he broke into her home, beat her and stabbed her repeatedly after she ended the relationship in May 2024.
Shehorn, a Hollywood make-up artist, took the witness stand with visible scars on her arm and neck and told the court she had taken out a restraining order against Pasqual after the relationship turned abusive. She said she still has nightmares about the attack and described the moment she realized the violence could kill her, saying she lay in a pool of her own blood and wondered whether that was how her life would end.
The judge said the evidence showed Shehorn’s injuries were so catastrophic that she was clinically dead twice, but also said Pasqual had expressed remorse. That view was undercut, the judge said, by an April 29 phone call in which Pasqual allegedly mocked Shehorn for what she had gone through, a detail that sharpened the contrast between his words in court and his conduct outside it.
Pasqual was later arrested at a border checkpoint in Texas, and the sentencing now leaves him serving one of the harshest punishments available under state law for the attack. Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman said Shehorn survived miraculously and stood in court to testify about the brutality she endured, testimony prosecutors said was crucial to securing the guilty verdict. For Shehorn, the case is no longer about whether Pasqual will face justice; it is about living with the aftermath of an attack that nearly took her life twice and will now keep him behind bars for decades.
