Lauryn Hill Sentenced to 3 Months in Federal Prison for Tax Evasion
Former Fugees star Lauryn Hill was sentenced to serve three months in federal prison Monday for failing to pay taxes on more than $2 million in earnings during a five-year period.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Madeline Cox Arleo in Newark, N.J. federal court also sentenced the Grammy award-winning artist to three months of home confinement with electronic monitoring after she is released form prison. Hill must also serve a year of supervised release and pay a $60,000 fine in addition to paying her tax debt to the IRS, which was $1,006,517 before recent payments.
Hill had claimed that she was "manipulated and threatened" and believed that she was in danger and was forced to go into hiding. With all that going on in her personal life she neglected to pay her taxes, but did not do so intentionally.
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"I have been working towards this for a long time, not just because of my current legal situation, but because I am an artist, I love to create, and I need the proper platform to do so," Hill wrote last month on Tumblr.
According to reports she earned about $2.3 million between 2005 and 2009, but she had only pleaded guilty to failing to pay taxes from 2005 through 2007. However, Judge Arleo stated the sentence was based on the full five years.
Regarding her tax case, Hill released a statement last year saying: "As my potential to work, and therefore earn freely, was being threatened, I did whatever needed to be done in order to insulate my family from the climate of hostility, false entitlement, manipulation, racial prejudice, sexism and ageism that I was surrounded by."
She added, "This was absolutely critical while trying to find and establish a new and very necessary community of healthy people, and also heal and detoxify myself and my family while raising my young children."
Hill is tentatively scheduled to begin her prison term July 8. It was not immediately clear where she would serve the sentence.
