Actress Daniele Watts in ‘Django Unchained’
Source: Facebook
Actress Daniele Watts was handcuffed and briefly detained by police officers in Los Angeles because they assumed she was a prostitute and her white boyfriend was her client.
Watts, who was Coco in the 2012 film Django Unchained and plays Martin Lawrence’s daughter on the FX TV show Partners, had a rough run-in with Los Angeles Police Department officers on Thursday.
While the Black actress was out with her white boyfriend, chef Brian James Lucas, cops approached the couple and accused Watts of being a prostitute.
Lucas captured several photos of the incident and posted about what happened on Facebook.
In Lucas’s opinion, the cops were racially profiling his girlfriend.
“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 on Facebook in addition to sharing photos of Watts in handcuffs.
The petite actress is seen crying in several images while dressed in an outfit that certainly would not suggest she was a prostitute.
Watts was dressed in sneakers, colorful shorts, and a white graphic T-shirt.
Lucas went on to reveal that Watts experienced this same thing when she was only 16 years old.
“This is something that happened to her and her father when she was 16,” Lucas wrote. “What an assumption to make!!! Because of my past experience with the law, I gave him my ID knowing we did nothing wrong and when they asked D for hers, she refused to give it because they had no right to do so.”
Source: Facebook
Despite Watts having the right not to hand over her identification, she was quickly put into handcuffs and allegedly injured in the process.
“So they handcuffed her and threw her roughly into the back of the cop car until they could figure out who she was,” Lucas continued. “In the process of handcuffing her, they cut her wrist, which was truly NOT COOL!!!”
The images on his social media page have generated a lot of attention and caused uproar on the social media site.
“This is clearly racist,” one comment said under an image of Watts crying in handcuffs with an officer standing by her side.
Another comment asked why Watts was the only one placed in handcuffs if Lucas was allegedly “the client.”
Other commenters said they were “disgusted” by the way the actress had been treated and encouraged her to file a lawsuit.
So far, there has been no talk of a lawsuit from the actress, and it does not seem likely that she will file one.
Watts was taken out of the handcuffs as soon as officers were able to confirm her identity.
