Danièle Watts, an actress from the Quentin Tarantino movie Django Unchained , claims she was accosted by the Los Angeles-area police on Thursday. Watts, who currently stars as Martin Lawrence’s daughter in the FX show Partners , posted an account on her Facebook page about the incident. The story was reported by both Variety and Mic .
Watts said she was “handcuffed and detained” by police in Studio City because they thought she was a prostitute.
“Today I was handcuffed and detained by 2 police officers from the Studio City Police Department after refusing to agree that I had done something wrong by showing affection, fully clothed, in a public place,” wrote Watts on her Facebook page. “When the officer arrived, I was standing on the sidewalk by a tree. I was talking to my father on my cell phone. I knew that I had done nothing wrong, that I wasn’t harming anyone, so I walked away.”
Watts wrote that a few minutes later two police officers “accosted” her and forced her into handcuffs when she refused to show identification.
Watts’ white husband, Brian Lucas, said in his account of the incident that his wife was targeted because police didn’t like seeing an interracial couple showing affection in public.
In his own post on his Facebook page, Lucas said that “from the questions that [police] asked me as D was already on her phone with her dad, 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).”
Watts said that the experience made her flashback on the many times that her father had been harassed by police while she was growing up.
“I was sitting in that back of this cop car, filled with adrenaline, my wrist bleeding in pain, and it occurred to me, that even there, I STILL HAD POWER OVER MY OWN SPIRIT,” wrote Watts.
She said that she refused to be forced to feel badly about herself and just sat in the car crying. She also said that the experience will not intimidate her.
“I will continue to look any ‘authority figure’ in the eye without fear,” she wrote. “NO POLICE OFFICER OR GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL IS MORE POWERFUL THAN ME. WE ARE EQUALS.”
Watts said that though she was angry, frustrated and in a state of rage over what was happening to her, she still made a point of expressing herself to the police who detained her.
“The tears I cry for a country that calls itself ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’ and yet detains people for claiming that very right,” she wrote.
She was released by police after they figured out who she was.