Yesterday Lauryn Hill reportedly paid $900,000 on the back taxes she owed the government, just one day before her sentencing hearing. If she thought that everything was taken care of, she was mistaken because when she showed up to court today, she was sentenced to three months in prison. After she’s done with that, she’ll be on house arrest for another three months.
She was facing one year on three counts of tax evasion and although her attorney fought hard for probation after Lauryn pleaded guilty last year, they just couldn’t avoid her spending some nights in the clink. Lauryn recently claimed that she wasn’t able to earn the money to pay off her bill without endangering the lives of her children, and last year she wrote in an open letter that she didn’t pay her taxes in 2005, 2006, and 2007 because she decided to remove herself from society after receiving death threats.
According to Concrete Loop, she said in court:
I was put into a system I didn’t know the nature of.. I’m a child of former slaves. I got into an economic paradigm and had that imposed on me. 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.
