Actress Daniele Watts, who appeared in “Django Unchained,” has claimed she was wrongfully detained by police last week after a bystander saw her kissing her white husband inside a car in Los Angeles.
In a Facebook post on Sept. 11, Watts said she was handcuffed and detained by two Los Angeles Police Department officers after “refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place” with her husband, Brian Lucas.
“When the officer arrived, I was standing on the sidewalk by a tree. I was talking to my father on my cell phone. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I wasn’t harming anyone, so I walked away,” she wrote. “A few minutes later, I was still talking to my dad when two different police officers accosted me and forced me into handcuffs.”
Lucas presented the officers with his ID, but Watts refused.
The LAPD confirmed that officers had responded to an “indecent exposure” complaint in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Studio City involving a man and a woman inside a silver Mercedes, which led to Watts’s brief detainment.
TMZreleased a video recording of the interaction between Watts and one of the officers.
Lucas also weighed in on his Facebook account, saying he and Watts were “accosted by police officers after showing our affection publicly.”
“I could tell that whoever called on us (including the officers), saw a tatted RAWKer white boy and a hot bootie shorted black girl and thought we were a HO (prostitute) & a TRICK (client),” he wrote in a post on Thursday.
Throughout the incident, Watts wrote, she recalled her father’s own shame and anger toward law enforcement officials over what he called wrongful accusations. Watts said she cried upon being handcuffed by the police. “The tears I cry for a country that calls itself ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ and yet detains people for claiming that very right,” she wrote in her Facebook post.
Watts and Lucas were later released. The LAPD is conducting an internal investigation of the incident.
Watts has also appeared in the TV series “How I Met Your Mother,” “Weeds,” and “Private Practice.”
