In 2004, at age 70, he was arrested on domestic violence charges against his fourth wife. On this occasion he was sentenced to a drug rehabilitation program, although his recovery doesn’t seem to have lasted. But in 1998 he reprised his antics and was arrested again on nearly identical charges: discharging a rifle, this time at his South Carolina home, and leading police on another car chase. He was freed in 1991 after serving half his six-year sentence for the blowup at the insurance company. (Among other things, he allegedly ventilated her $35,000 black mink coat with bullets.) Last April she filed suit against him for assault, then dropped the charge. His eight-year marriage to Adrienne, his third wife, has been tempestuous. In 1985 the IRS slapped a lien on his 62-acre spread on rural Beech Island, about ten miles outside Augusta, and he was forced to auction it off. The 1980s were a particularly rocky time, according to TIME’s 1988 report on his prison stint, which noted:īrown’s fall from the top of the charts to a four-man prison cell has been going on for several years. He earned the nicknames he gave himself: “ Godfather of Soul,” “Minister of Super Heavy Funk,” and the “Hardest-Working Man in Show Business,” among others.īut despite his staggering successes, he couldn’t stay out of legal trouble for long. He became a soul and R&B legend for his innovative songwriting and his impassioned showmanship, influencing performers from Michael Jackson to Mick Jagger. In many ways, his was a classic American bootstrapping success story, fueled by raw talent and unrelenting effort. He sang in the prison choir and started a band when he got out.
It became the latest entry on a rap sheet that had begun during Brown’s impoverished childhood in rural South Carolina, where he went to prison for the first time at age 15 for breaking into cars.
Years later, this episode would frame the 2014 Brown biopic Get On Up. They shot out two of his tires he drove on the rims for six miles. He tried to ram police cars with his pickup truck. When the police arrived, Brown led them on a high-speed chase through Georgia and South Carolina.
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