Last year, Lauryn Hill was charged for not paying taxes on over $1.8 million dollars she earned between 2005 and 2007. Despite the singer’s attempts to come to an arrangement, she was sentenced yesterday for three charges of tax evasion. Though Hill faced up to three years in prison for her crimes, it has now been revealed that she will serve only 3 months.
According to an Associated Press report on the sentencing, Hill compared the current U.S. economic system to the system of slavery imposed on her ancestors. Hill pleaded guilty to the tax evasion charges. She will spend three months in prison, three months under house arrest, and pay a $60,000 fine.
Hill became famous as part of hip hop group the Fugees before striking out on her own and finding success with her solo album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
Hill last week confirmed on her Tumblr blog that she had signed a new record deal with Sony. She also vaguely commented on her legal and financial troubles:
I’ve remained silent, after an extensive healing process. This has been a 10+ year battle, for a long time played out behind closed doors, but now in front of the public eye. This is an old conflict between art and commerce… free minds, and minds that are perhaps overly tethered to structure. This is about inequity, and the resulting disenfranchisement caused by it. I’ve been fighting for existential and economic freedom, which means the freedom to create and live without someone threatening, controlling, and/or manipulating the art and the artist, by tying the purse strings…
…Only a completely complicated set of traps, manipulations, and inequitable business arrangements could put someone who has accomplished the things that I have, financially in need of anything. I am one artist who finds value in openly discussing the dynamics within this industry that force artists to compromise or distort themselves and what they do, rather than allowing them to make the music that people need. There are volumes that could (and will) be said.