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Flavor Flav Arrested On Domestic Violence Charge In Las Vegas
A lawyer for Public Enemy co-founder and "Flavor of Love" star Flava Flav denied the report that led to the misdemeanor charge.
An alleged dispute with a women over the treatment of his teenage son has landed Public Enemy's former hype man in hot water with the police — again.
Flavor Flav, whose given name is William Jonathan Drayton, was arrested by Henderson Police in Nevada and charged with misdemeanor domestic battery on Oct. 5, according to a complaint released on Tuesday and reviewed by the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
In the report, police officers recount being called to a home in northwest Henderson, Nevada — about five miles southeast of Las Vegas' McCarran International Airport — in response to a call from a woman who said the 62-year-old rapper had hit her and taken her cell phone.
Upon arrival, police interviewed Flavor Flav, the woman and their son.
Flav said he'd come to the house after receiving a call from his son that the boy's mother had threatened to send him to a juvenile detention center. The police report stated that “He disliked when [the woman] makes those threats, so he came home to speak to her about it,” according to the Review-Journal.
When he arrived, Flav told police, the woman was on the phone and reportedly ignoring him, so he took the phones from her and the couple began to argue. Flav told police that he pinned the woman's hands to the bed to stop her from hitting him.
The woman allegedly admitted to threatening her son when he was "mouthy," but denied hitting Flav, saying instead that he attacked her while her son begged Flav to stop, according to the paper. TMZ reports that the police statement they obtained alleged Flav had poked the woman in the nose, threw her on the bed and then grabbed her phones.
Neither party had visible injuries, according to police. Flav was arrested and booked on the misdemeanor charge.
Famed Las Vegas criminal defense lawyer David Chesnoff issued a statement about his client's case:
"In alleged domestic violence cases," it read, "there are often two sides to the story and we will explain our side in the courtroom not in the media."
This was not Flav's first domestic battery arrest in the Vegas area: in 2012, the Associated Press reports that he was arrested by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police and charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon and misdemeanor domestic battery in a case involving his then-fiancée and her son. He pleaded guilty to a gross misdemeanor attempted battery charge and a misdemeanor domestic battery charge in 2014, for which he was required to attend a 12-session domestic violence counseling program and serve probation.
In 1991, Flav pleaded guilty in New York to assaulting his then-girlfriend and the mother of three of his children and served a month in jail. In 1993, he served another three months in New York for shooting at a neighbor.
On Oct. 19, People reported, Flav tweeted that he'd achieved a year of sobriety from alcohol. His lawyer told TMZ that he'd also quit smoking cigarettes 15 months prior.
