UPDATE: 5/23/2024 at 10:01 p.m. ET.
“This evening, police in Fort Irwin, CA, arrested Kisean Anderson, aka Sean Kingston (2/3/1990) without incident on a Broward Sheriff’s Office arrest warrant for numerous fraud and theft charges,” law enforcement told Us Weekly in a statement. “According to investigators, he will be booked into jail in San Bernardino, California.”
Original story below:
Sean Kingston’s mother, Janice Turner, was arrested on Thursday, May 23, following a police raid on the singer’s rented Florida mansion.
Turner, 61, faces numerous fraud and theft charges, NBC6 first reported. Broward Sheriff’s deputies and Davie Police SWAT members conducted the raid, and aerial footage from NBC6 showed Turner being led into a police car in handcuffs.
The raid was triggered by a lawsuit filed in February against Kingston, 34, by an attorney representing Ver Ver Entertainment. The suit alleges that the singer purchased promotional items from the company without paying for them. Among them was a 232-inch TV that Kingston has posed with in pictures.
“He likes having bling, he likes showing off, he’s a showman,” attorney Dennis Card told NBC6. “My client has a $150,000 television sound system that’s in there, there’s also about $1 million worth of watches that are in there, there’s a $80,000 custom bed that was ordered. This is an organized systematic fraud.”
He continued, “He’s got basically a script, he says that he works with Justin Bieber, and that he obviously puts on a big show here, this is a rental house, he doesn’t own it, and he lures people using his celebrity into having them release things without him paying for it and then he simply never pays.”
Card claimed that Turner was “complicit” in Kingston’s fraud and that she “knows what’s going on.”
The Broward Sheriff’s Office confirmed to People that the investigation began in Dania Beach and is ongoing. The complaint alleges “numerous false representations” from Kingston, who allegedly claimed he had a “current and ongoing working relationship” with Bieber, 30. The two have not released a song together since 2010.
The suit also claims that Kingston promised to produce promotional videos with Bieber in order to reduce his payments but that he had no intention of doing so.
“I filed a lawsuit against Sean Kingston,” Card told People. “A detective in Broward County read my lawsuit and contacted me, and so we went down and gave, with my client, a recorded statement and an affidavit.”
“So we’ve been waiting on this raid for more than two months now,” he added.
Turner previously pled guilty to four counts of filing false loan applications and one count of bank fraud in 2006, according to court documents obtained by NBC6. She was sentenced to 16 months in prison and five years of supervised release.
