Breakout Love & Hip Hop Hollywood star Apple Watts is no stranger to drama. Her colorful life — including her legendary stripping moves, and a stint as an adult film actress — has earned her plenty of haters. But her reputation for painful honesty, even in the face of questions like “Why did Apple Watts go to jail?”, is maybe the number one reason why she seems to earn more fans than detractors every single week.
Plenty of Apple Watts’ Love & Hip Hop co-stars have rap sheets
Before going any further, it’s worth pointing out that Apple’s run-ins with the law put her in good company, Love & Hip Hop-wise. The list of LHH stars who’ve had their legal trouble chronicled on the show is illustrious. LHHNY star Mendeecees Harris is serving out the last few years of his sentence on drug trafficking charges. LHHATL player Scrapp DeLeon has just over two years remaining on his drug trafficking sentence. And former LHHATL cast member Lovely Mimi was arrested on drug trafficking and firearm charges back in 2013.
Nor does the list stop there. One of the most notorious Love & Hip Hop cast members with a criminal background has to be Karen King: the LHHATL participant made big waves with her long history of fraud, identity theft, and attempted murder charges before debuting in Season 5. And probably the most notorious (for our money) is Tommie, whose gallery of now nearly two dozen mugshots we made into a meme that goes viral every time a new season of LHHATL drops.
Why did Apple Watts go to jail? She’s been arrested at least three times
Having said all that, we’ve managed to track down three separate instances of Apple (real name Jontelle Watts) being booked on criminal charges. The most recent is a DUI charge in Apple’s Highland CA; Apple was arrested on December 1st of last year, apparently after her debut season of Love & Hip Hop Hollywood had already begun filming:
On that exact date, Apple took to social media to claim she’d been the victim of a carjacking, presumably while she’d been in the club stripping:
After a week without posting anything at all, Apple returned to social media on December 8th. She thanked her family for coming to her support, and said she was “out and free”:
So, while we can’t say for sure, it sounds like one of Apple’s most recent arrests resulted in her being jailed for approximately one week.
Other Apple Watts jail charges are more mysterious
In 2016, Apple was arrested on a vague and unspecified warrant. Though the warrant looks to stem from an earlier charge, we haven’t been able to figure out exactly what that charge was. Here’s the arrest record:
There’s also one Apple Watts jail charge from her time in Nevada, where she was a student at UNLV. Clark County Criminal Court records show one case in which Jontelle Watts was the defendant: she was arrested in March of 2010 on the charge of Battery with a Deadly Weapon. Apple’s case never went to trial, though, and it’s unclear if the case is still active:
There’s also the curious post Apple made earlier this year — on July 14th, in fact, just nine days before her first season of LHHH premiered. In the Instagram post, Apple again thanked “everyone” for “all the support” without saying what it was she’d been in jail for. Since we haven’t yet found a record of Apple being arrested in 2018, it’s possible she was serving further time on the DUI charge from December 2017.
Here’s the photo Apple used for the Instagram post, along with her caption. (We’ve screencapped both in case they’re later deleted from IG.)
We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update the article if we hear back from her. In the meantime, her breakout season of Love & Hip Hop Hollywood continues Monday nights at 8 on VH1.
(Photo credits: Why did Apple Watts go to jail via Instagram, Facebook, Clark County NV Criminal Court)
John Sharp is a Starcasm’s chief editorial correspondent-at-large. Tips: E-mail at john@starcasm.net or send on Twitter at @john_starcasm.
