Lauryn Hill Faces Eviction From New Jersey Home

Lauryn Hill is facing eviction from her New Jersey home.

Hill has been renting a mansion in South Orange since 2009, but she allegedly stopped making rent payments last month. Her landlord has since filed a lawsuit, demanding Hill either pay her rent or leave the mansion.

However, Hill is set to be sentenced for tax fraud next week and is facing several years in federal prison. She is accused of not filing her taxes between 2005 and 2008, which carries a penalty of one year in prison and a $1,000 fine for each count. Hill owes nearly $1.8 million in back taxes but has said that she didn’t file because she received a number of threats telling her not to pay.

“As my potential to work, and therefore earn freely, was being threatened, I did whatever needed to be done in order to insulate my family from the climate of hostility, false entitlement, manipulation, racial prejudice, sexism and ageism that I was surrounded by,” Hill wrote in a statement last year explaining her lack of payments. “This was absolutely critical while trying to find and establish a new and very necessary community of healthy people, and also heal and detoxify myself and my family while raising my young children.”

Hill is asking the court to take into consideration that she has received threats in the past. Court documents show that the former Fugees singer “withdrew from society at large due to what she perceived as manipulation and very real threats to herself and her family.” Hill also said it would be easier for her to pay the back taxes “if she is placed on probation and continued to work.”

Lauryn Hill has performed sporadically since the release of her 1998 Grammy-winning album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Most recently, she was seen with Nas on the “Life Is Good/Black Rage” tour last fall.

A judge will announce Lauryn Hill’s sentence on April 23.

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