20 Celebs You Probably Forgot Did Jail Time In The '90s
It feels like a lot of the time, celebrities live in their own world and abide by their own rules. They're just not quite like the rest of us.
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Once in a while, a celebrity is made to suffer the consequences of their own action. There are even quite a few who have done jail time for some major screw-ups.
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These are the celebrities who spent some time in the slammer in the '90s.
1.Matthew McConaughey was arrested on marijuana possession charges in 1998. Police were called because he was smoking, listening to a Cameroonian singer and guitarist, and playing along on his bongos at 2:30 a.m. on a Sunday night/Monday morning...naked.
McConaughey was also charged with resisting arrest, to which he responded, "You broke in my house! F**k, yeah, I resisted." He spent nine hours in jail.
2.Before hitting it big in his rap career, the late Notorious B.I.G. did nine months in a North Carolina jail in 1990 for dealing crack.
3.Zsa Zsa Gabor was arrested in 1990, after she was pulled over for driving erratically and found to have an invalid license and an open container of alcohol. She slapped a police officer during the encounter.
At first, she was given probation and ordered to complete 120 hours of community service at a shelter for homeless women. Zsa Zsa violated probation, however, which was how she ended up with three days in jail.
4.Slick Rick was convicted of attempted second-degree murder in 1991, after shooting his cousin. He was sentenced to 3 to 10 years in prison but served 5.
As a result, he was nearly deported as a foreign national who'd done over five years in an American jail. He was able to beat the case, however, and continues to live in New York.
5.James Brown got out of jail in 1991, after serving three years of a six-year sentence for taking out a gun during a dispute at an insurance company, evading a police officer, and leading cops on a car chase.
6.Robert Downey Jr. was first arrested in 1996, when he was pulled over in his pickup truck was found to have cocaine, heroin, and a pistol in his possession.
Downey ended up serving a year in California Substance Abuse Treatment Facility and State Prison in Corcoran.
7.Mike Tyson was found guilty of rape in 1992 and was sentenced to 10 years, with 4 suspended, and an additional 6 years of probation. He ended up serving just under three years and was released in March 1995.
8.Tommy Lee spent six months in jail in 1998 for spousal battery after a domestic violence incident with ex-wife Pamela Anderson.
9.Rick James was convicted for two separate instances of kidnapping and assaulting two different women while under the influence of crack cocaine in 1993. He spent three years at Folsom State Prison.
10.Before the world knew 50 Cent, he spent six months in a correctional boot camp as a result of drug charges. It was in 1994, when he was just 16 years old.
11.Leona Helmsley, known as the Queen of Mean and wife of real estate mogul Harry Helmsley, was sentenced to four years in jail in 1992 for evading $1.7 million in taxes.
Helmsley served just two years, but she also had to pay $8 million in taxes and complete 750 hours of community service.
12.Tupac was convicted of sexually assaulting a 19-year-old woman in 1995. He was originally sentenced to four years in jail. He served just nine months of that sentence.
13.Felicia Pearson was convicted of second-degree murder in 1996 and served six and a half years in jail before discovering success in acting through The Wire.
14.In 1997, Christian Slater allegedly got drunk on tequila, did cocaine, and attacked the woman and man he was with, as well as the officers who came to arrest him.
Slater was sentenced to 90 days in jail and renegotiated his start date so that he could attend the premiere of Hard Rain. He ended up serving 59 days.
15.Flavor Flav was in jail twice in the '90s.
The first was in 1991 after he pleaded guilty to assaulting his then-girlfriend Karen Ross. He continued to spiral into addiction, and in 1993, he went to jail for 90 days for attempted murder after shooting at his neighbor. Thankfully, he began his journey to sobriety after that release.
16.MLB star Darryl Strawberry was indicted on three counts of evasion and conspiracy after failing to report over $350,000 in income. He pleaded guilty to just one count of tax evasion.
He served three months in jail and three months in home confinement in 1995.
17.O.J. Simpson served time in jail in 1995 leading up to his trial for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. He was acquitted and released in October 1995.
18.Heidi Fleiss was convicted of federal tax evasion in 1996 and sentenced to three years in jail. She served 20 months at the Federal Correctional Institution in California before being released to a halfway house in 1998.
19.Pete Rose received a lifetime ban from baseball in 1989 for betting on the sport as a team manager and former player. It was during that investigation that officials learned he was dodging taxes on his winning, earning him a five-month prison sentence in 1990 for falsifying tax returns.
20.Rae Carruth was at the beginning of his NFL career when he hired a hitman to kill a woman who was pregnant with his child. The woman died, but their child lived.
Carruth was released in October 2018 after serving 18 years in prison.