After notorious Hollywood bad girl Lindsay Lohan was arrested early this morning for allegedly hitting a man in her Porsche SUV and then leaving the scene, a surveillance video from the Dream Hotel seems to indicate that Lohan was telling the truth when she said the man set her up.
According to TMZ, the hotel’s surveillance cameras caught the entire incident—and at the very least the man is “grossly exaggerating” his claim against Lohan.
The “Lohan Arrested” headlines were blasted across the world this morning via the internet, with the man, a cook by the name of Jose Rodriguez, embellishing the story by telling the Daily News that Lohan and her cohorts “acted like I was nothing, that no one could touch her because she was rich and powerful.”
When Lohan emerged from the club at the Dream at about 2:30 a.m., she was taken into custody as she frantically screamed, “Call my dad! Call my dad!” She was taken to the station, fingerprinted, photographed and booked for leaving the scene of an accident (a misdemeanor), and then released with a desk appearance ticket.
All the while Lohan was loudly proclaiming she didn’t do anything wrong.
Readers could be excused for believing every word of what they read this morning, based on Lohan’s troubled past. But the videotape tells a far different story.
The tape shows Lohan driving down a ramp into the hotel at a rate that could be described as a crawl while a man crosses a pedestrian path in front of her car. Lohan’s Porsche Cayenne gets very close to the man, but it’s unclear if she made contact with him, the source told TMZ. The two detectives who viewed the tape disagreed about whether her car made any contact with the man.
“One detective felt Lindsay’s car ‘grazed’ the back of the alleged victim’s leg, but the other detective felt the car never made contact,” according to TMZ.
Once Lohan goes down the ramp, the video shows the man “sprinting” after her. This is a man who supposedly just got hit by her car. He never gets close to her and never has any contact with her, but he does appear to recognize her because she had gotten out of the car and drawn a crowd near the entrance to the club. Lohan doesn’t seem flustered or aware that she may have hit someone crossing in front of her car.
After sprinting down the ramp, the man called 911 and was taken to the hospital by the ambulance. Soon afterward, he had his date with the media.
