'Django' actress detained by cops, says she was mistaken for prostitute

theGRIO REPORT - 'Django Unchained' actress, Daniele Watts, claims she was 'accosted' by cops who thought she and her white husband were a 'ho' and 'trick'...

Luther Vandross was outed as gay after his death.

At a time when the relationship between the black community and law enforcement is as tense as it has been in years, an African-American actress in Los Angeles has come forward with new allegations bound to stir the pot even more.

Django Unchained actress Daniele Watts took to social media on Sept. 11 claiming that police officers in Studio City, CA, accosted, handcuffed, and detained her on suspicion of prostitution because she was kissing her white boyfriend.

“Today I was handcuffed and detained by 2 police officers from the Studio City Police Department after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place,” Watts, who played Coco in Django Unchained, wrote on her Facebook page Thursday.

Her husband, chef Brian James Lucas, said in a separate post he provided proof of identification to the officers, but that his wife refused when asked “because they had no right to do so.”

“From the questions that [one of the police officers] asked me as D was already on her phone with her dad, 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],” Lucas wrote of the incident in a Facebook post.

Witnesses from a nearby office building reportedly told LAPD that they saw Watts and Lucas having sex in the passenger seat of their parked car.

A public information officer for the Los Angeles Police Department told Variety there was no record of the incident because Watts was neither arrested nor brought into the station for questioning.

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Lucas claims the officers handcuffed Watts and “threw her roughly into the back of the cop car” after she refused to show her ID. “In the process of handcuffing her, they cut her wrist, which was truly NOT COOL!!!” he wrote.

In her own reflections on the incident, Watts says she tried to grow from the experience.

“Today I exist with courage, knowing that I am blessed to have experienced what I did today. All of those feelings, no matter how uncomfortable. These feelings are what builds my internal strength, my ability to grow through WHATEVER may happen to me,” she wrote. “That internal knowing is what guides me in this world. Not the law, not fear, not mistrust of government or cops or anything else.”

 

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