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Legally Bombed: Hubby's DUI Charge Lands Witherspoon In Tank

Actress Reese Witherspoon and her husband, Jim Toth, watch an NBA basketball game in Los Angeles in March.
Reed Saxon
/
AP
Actress Reese Witherspoon and her husband, Jim Toth, watch an NBA basketball game in Los Angeles in March.

Reese Witherspoon and her husband, James Toth, were arrested early Friday morning in Atlanta, Variety reports. A police report obtained by Variety says a state trooper saw Toth weaving over a double line.

"Toth appeared disheveled and his breath smelled of alcohol, according to the police report, prompting the officer to administer a sobriety test," Variety reports.

The Associated Press adds:

"Before the field sobriety test began, Witherspoon got out of the car, was told to get back in and obeyed, the report said. After she got out a second time, the trooper said he warned her that she would be arrested if she left the car again."

Then Toth, an agent with Creative Artists Agency, was arrested and charged with driving under the influence and failure to maintain the lane, and Witherspoon got out of the car again, the AP says. After being told to get back in the car, she "stated that she was a 'U.S. citizen' and that she was allowed to 'stand on American ground.' "

At that point, the officer began to arrest her. Variety reports Witherspoon and Toth were released around 3:30 a.m. on Friday.

Variety says the arrest could provide "an unlikely career stumble for Witherspoon, one of an elite cadre of female actresses who has established herself for a time as a relatively reliable box-office draw going back to films in which she toplined such as Sweet Home Alabama and Legally Blonde."

Part of that success, Variety says, "can be attributed to the squeaky clean image she's maintained in over two decades of steady work."

Witherspoon has been in Atlanta shooting indie drama The Good Lie, in which she plays an American woman assigned to help young Sudanese refugees.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Dana Farrington is a digital editor coordinating online coverage on the Washington Desk — from daily stories to visual feature projects to the weekly newsletter. She has been with the NPR Politics team since President Trump's inauguration. Before that, she was among NPR's first engagement editors, managing the homepage for NPR.org and the main social accounts. Dana has also worked as a weekend web producer and editor, and has written on a wide range of topics for NPR, including tech and women's health.

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