This musician and actress will be singing the blues now that she’s a member of the celebrity tax-evasion club.
Grammy-winning singer, songwriter and actress, Lauryn Hill, was sentenced to three months in prison and three months of house arrest for failure to file tax returns for five years. Hill failed to report over $2.3 million worth of income.
Hill, who scored eight Grammy awards for her album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, pleaded guilty to three counts of failure to provide tax returns. During the hearing, Hill compared her situation to that of slavery:
“I was put into a system I didn’t know the nature of,” she said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “I’m a child of former slaves. I got into an economic paradigm and had that imposed on me,” she said. “I sold 50 million units … now I’m up here paying a tax debt. If that’s not likened to slavery, I don’t know what is.”
But if you had asked Hill at the time the charges were first levied, she would have had an even lengthier explanation. She explained on her blog that she had gone “underground… in order to build a community of people, like-minded in their desire for freedom and the right to pursue their goals and lives without being manipulated and controlled by a media protected military industrial complex with a completely different agenda.”
Welcome to the club
Hill isn’t the only celebrity who has trouble with Uncle Sam. Check out these famous figures who couldn’t be bothered:
- Richard Pryor: 10 days in jail for tax evasion in 1974
- Sophia Loren: 18-day prison sentence in 1982 for tax evasion
- Chuck Berry: three months in prison and 1,000 hours of benefits shows for unreported tour income in the 1970s
- Ronald Isley: 37 months in federal prison for tax evasion and $3.1 million in back taxes
- Richard Hatch: 51 months in prison for failing to pay taxes on his $1 million in Survivor winnings
- Wesley Snipes: sentenced to three years in prison for failing to file tax returns
