Actress Daniele Watts, who appeared in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, is back in hot water.
This year, she and her boyfriend, Brian Lucas, a chef, pleaded no contest to disturbing the peace and were ordered to write an apology letter to the officers involved in their high-profile detention.
In exchange for the plea, charges of lewd conduct that had been filed against Watts and Lucas were dropped, the Los Angeles Times reports.
But the apology letter the couple presented to the judge last week raised concern, the report says. In it, Watts said the sergeant involved in the encounter provoked her, describing him as sarcastic and dismissive. She signed her name with a heart but didn't offer a direct apology, according to the Times.
In a second letter submitted this week, the Times says, Watts apologized “for my lack of emotional control” and asked for forgiveness.
A judge, however, called the apologies “insincere and passive-aggressive,” and sentenced the couple Wednesday to 15 days of community service and two years of probation, according to the Times.
Frank Mateljan, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, told the Times that the couple was ordered “to serve a year of formal diversion, complete 40 hours of community service and write letters apologizing to the Los Angeles police sergeant and an officer, as well as the occupants of a Ventura Boulevard building who reported them to police.”
Garnering national attention, the couple had accused the arresting officer of racial profiling after their Sept. 11, 2014, detention in Studio City on charges of lewd conduct. Watts is black and Lucas is white. Police denied racially profiling the couple, saying that the officer at the scene followed proper protocol.
No charges were filed, but a department spokesman said that investigators interviewed “witnesses who were willing to provide evidence of a criminal act,” the report says.
Watts and Lucas initially pleaded not guilty to the lewd-conduct charges and portrayed the actions that prompted the complaint to the police as a “passionate public embrace” and “extended public display of affection,” the Times writes.
The allegation of racial profiling may have backfired on Watts, who in turn was accused of race-baiting.
Read more at the Los Angeles Times.