Saturday, March 02, 2024 – A federal judge in Philadelphia has ordered ‘Empire’ actor Terrence Howard to pay nearly $1 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties after he allegedly threatened a Justice Department lawyer and maintained that it was “immoral for the United States government to charge taxes to the descendants of slaves.”
Terrence reportedly avoided efforts by the IRS to collect
$578,000 in income taxes they say he failed to pay between 2010 and 2019. The
Justice Department sued him in 2022.
Despite a months-long effort to engage Howard in court after
the Justice Department sued him in 2022, the actor’s only response was a
voicemail he allegedly left on the phone of the case’s lead tax attorney in
November.
According to Philly Inquirer, the actor responded with a
voicemail sent to the case’s lead tax attorney. “Four hundred years of forced
labor and never receiving any compensation for it,” Terrence said in the
message per a court transcript. “Now you have the gall to try and prosecute and
charge taxes to the descendants of a broken people that you are responsible for
causing the breakage.”
The recording cut Howard off midsentence, but he called the
attorney back to continue.
“In truth, the entire United States should, by default,
become the property of the descendants of slaves,” he said. “But since you do
not have the ability [or] the courage to do it, let’s try this in court. …
We’re gonna bring you down.”
Despite that vow, Howard never formally responded to the
lawsuit. And after a court hearing last week in Philadelphia, U.S. District
Judge John F. Murphy granted the government’s request to enter a $903,115
default judgment against the actor, a ruling that was first reported by the
legal news service Law360.
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