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15 Angry Celeb Mugshots That Put Donald Trump’s Photo To Shame – Nicki Swift

The following article includes mentions of drug and alcohol use and domestic violence.

Donald Trump is used to mugging for the camera, but not like this. The former host of “The Apprentice” got a one-of-a-kind presidential portrait when he was booked at the Fulton County Jail in Georgia. The alleged crime that earned Trump the first presidential mugshot was election interference, in case you’re having a hard time keeping up with his ever-growing list of legal woes.

Trump had to be well aware that his photo was going to appear in history books — and on the merchandise that he quickly started huckstering to fundraise for his campaign. He decided to be immortalized with a Grinchian grimace on his face, and his former National Security Advisor John Bolton believes the glare was a carefully calculated move.

“He looks like a thug, and I think it’s intended to be a sign of intimidation against the prosecutors and judges,” he told CNN. Over on Fox News, pundits tried to spin Trump’s mugshot as a positive for the ex-pres. “I say this with an unblemished record of heterosexuality: He looks good, and he looks hard,” gushed “The Five” co-host Jesse Watters. Meanwhile, on “The Ingraham Angle,” contributor Raymond Arroyo suggested that the mugshot would give Trump street cred, pointing out that late rapper Tupac Skakur has a mugshot, too. Trump’s company also includes actors, athletes, and Real Housewives, a number of whom give him a run for his money when it comes to serving wrath and fury in their booking photos.

Nick Nolte’s tropic blunder made for a wild mugshot

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“Tropic Thunder” star Nick Nolte posed for one of the most viral celebrity mugshots on September 11, 2002. In a scene straight out of one of his action films, Nolte had been flying down the scenic Pacific Coast Highway, which is known for its serpentine twists and narrow lanes. Because he was failing to stay in his own lane, a number of concerned motorists called the police.

In his memoir, which is aptly titled “Rebel: My Life Outside the Lines,” Nolte blames the illegal drug GHB for his erratic driving. But we’re guessing a strong coastal wind and an open car window was possibly responsible for his hair, which looked as though “The Prince of Tides” star had rinsed it in the tide before his ill-fated joyride. 

In his mugshot, Nolte is giving the camera a fierce frown, and the shadows around his eyes intensify his menacing aura. But from the neck down, he appears ready to party; he’s sporting a shirt with a colorful tropical pattern. Somehow, the contrast between his expression and his attire makes his mugshot even more unnerving. “[I looked] like an asylum inmate out for a lark,” Nolte writes (via People). “In 1992, People magazine had named me the Sexiest Man Alive, and now, 10 years later, I looked to all the world like a madman.”

Woody Harrelson didn’t look so cheerful

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The Smoking Gun has helped spread the internet lore that “Cheers” actor Woody Harrelson was arrested for a very Woody Harrelson reason in 1982: dancing in the street and fleeing when some Columbus, Ohio, cops tried to put an end to his performance.

In his mugshot, Harrelson doesn’t look like the happy-go-lucky hippie wannabe you might have imagined him to be back then. His jaw is clenched, his stare is stone-cold, and he’s frowning ever-so-slightly. If looks could kill, let’s just say that he would look like a natural-born killer — if he weren’t wearing a preppy polo shirt.

Apparently, “The Hunger Games” star had a good reason to look seriously pissed off. He later spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about what really went down that night, and it wasn’t some gleeful gamboling followed by a comical police chase. “A cop stopped us for jaywalking and he was really rough,” Harrelson recalled. When Harrelson didn’t produce his ID fast enough, the cop repeatedly shoved him against a wall. This is why the actor made a run for it. After being apprehended by other equally violent officers, Harrelson tried to flee from the police van, this time in handcuffs. “I see this car and I hit it and it flipped me up in the air. I spun completely forward, landed on the back of my head, and then they had me and maced the sh** out of me,” he said. Luckily, he wasn’t seriously injured.

Mama June’s Elvis impression

Macon County Alabama Sheriff

“Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” star June Shannon, aka “Mama June,” looked all shook up after her 2019 arrest on drug charges. She and her beau at the time, Eugene Edward “Geno” Doak, were both booked by the Macon County Sheriff’s Office in Alabama and charged with possession of crack cocaine and drug paraphernalia, per People.

For her mugshot, Shannon kept her eyes downcast but curled her lip in an Elvis Presley-like snarl. She’d also been spending like she had The King’s bank account when it came to her drug use, telling Access that she and Doak blew through around $900,000 over the course of a year. “So much money was sent to our dope man,” she said. Shannon pleaded not guilty to the felony charges against her and avoided prison time. Instead, she had to perform 100 hours of community service and take occasional drug tests to prove that she was staying sober, per E!. The “Mama June: Family Crisis” star checked into rehab, dumped Doak, and later married mechanic Justin Stroud.

When she spoke to the Daily Mail in 2023, Shannon was three years sober and still sore over all that dough she spent to feed her addiction. “I think about a lot of things I could do with that money. My husband tells me all the time that I can’t dwell on it,” she said. We’re just glad she was able to kick her habit without having to do the jailhouse rock.

Tiger Woods’ intense stare

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When Tiger Woods took a cocktail of prescription drugs in an ill-advised attempt at pain management in 2017, the five-time Masters winner found himself making headlines yet again for a reason that had nothing to do with his prowess on the putting green. And soon, the press had a grim photo to pair with its stories about Woods’ latest vehicular incident: A mugshot.

Woods had recently undergone back surgery when Jupiter, Florida police arrested him on suspicion of driving under the influence. They found his Mercedes-Benz stopped on the road, and he was asleep in the driver’s seat. In dashcam footage shared by NBC News, a confused Woods seems to believe that he’s in California. “What happened was an unexpected reaction to prescribed medications,” he explained in a statement. “I didn’t realize the mix of medications had affected me so strongly.” The drugs found in his system included THC, two different painkillers, and sleep and anxiety medications. Per NBC News, Woods admitted that he messed up by mixing the drugs to make his post-surgery back pain more bearable. After pleading guilty to reckless driving, he received a year-long probation sentence.

In his mugshot, Woods has the eyes of a tiger — he’s staring dead straight at the camera with a stony expression. But during his booking, he joked about the state of his pate when he had to describe the color of his hair. “We’ll say brown and fading,” he quipped, per the Los Angeles Times.

Flavor Flav looked like he tasted something terrible

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Those clocks around Flavor Flav’s neck might help him ensure he’s always on time, but he’s learned the hard way that you shouldn’t speed to get where you’re going. The “Fight the Power” hitmaker might as well turn his speedometers into medallions for his collection of chains because he doesn’t seem to use them when he’s driving. True, he had a legit reason for putting the pedal to the metal in 2014 when he was stopped for ignoring the speed limit — he was on his way to his mother’s funeral, per TMZ — but this didn’t explain the 16 suspensions on his license that police discovered.

Despite the circumstances, Flav managed to smile in that mugshot. However, the Public Enemy hypeman looked like he was thinking about his worst enemy (a radar gun, maybe?) when he got arrested again in 2015. According to the Las Vegas-Review Journal, a trooper caught him going 32 miles over the speed limit. On top of that, Flav’s driver’s license and registration were both suspended, and he had marijuana and alcohol in the car. So, perhaps he’s pursing his lips in annoyance in his mugshot because he’s thinking about how hard it will be to avoid hard time. He ultimately caught a bit of a break, however, when he pleaded no contest to a single charge of driving under the influence and was handed a suspended jail term of 30 days.

Real Housewife Jules Wainstein got in real trouble

Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office

If you land a coveted spot on “The Real Housewives of New York City,” it pays to possess the ability to generate drama — even if you have to behave badly to do so. But some of Jules Wainstein’s worst behavior happened after her exit from the series in 2016. She’d only been a member of the “RHONY” cast for a single season when she decided that she didn’t want her ugly divorce from Michael Wainstein to play out in front of the Bravo cameras, per E!. It was also her contentious relationship with her ex that earned her a spot in the mugshot hall of shame.

The divorce battle raged on into early 2020 and took a turn for the worse when Michael called the cops on Jules. Per a police report obtained by Radar, the exes were performing a child custody exchange in Boca Raton, Florida, when Michael started filming Jules. She then lunged for his phone in a seeming attempt to stop him from recording her. “According to Michael, Julianne punched him in the face, which caused him to drop his cell phone,” the report reads. Jules admitted to hitting her ex when questioned by police but later pleaded not guilty to a domestic battery charge.

Jules reportedly confessed to being “angry” when she allegedly attacked Michael, and that particular emotion is written all over her frigid features in her mugshot; she looks like she’s ready for war.

Randy Travis’ mugshot is forever and ever, amen

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Randy Travis would have been much better off staying home and diggin’ up bones than getting behind the wheel in 2012. Bones actually came up during his arrest that year, which was the result of Travis getting intoxicated, crashing his vehicle near the town of Tioga, Texas, and lying down naked in the middle of the road, TMZ reported at the time. Dashcam footage of Travis’ arrest was later released in 2017, and he can be heard saying to the state trooper transporting him to the Grayson County Jail, “I pray to God that he will have a cancerous growth that infects his bones and every part of his body,” per The Dallas Morning News. Travis’ face is bruised and scratched in his mugshot, and his dark glower makes it easy to imagine that he was thinking similar thoughts when the photo was taken.

Travis also verbally threatened the lives of the troopers who arrived at the scene of the crash. However, a retaliation charge against him was dropped when he accepted a plea deal. For his DWI charge, Travis received a two-year probation sentence and had to complete a stint in rehab. 

When the dashcam footage was released, the singer’s rep released a statement. “Randy Travis is well-known to be a loving, caring person who is respectful of everyone,” it said in part, per Yahoo! Entertainment. “A video that shows anything otherwise only underscores that he was absolutely not himself.”

Willie Nelson looks like a real outlaw in his mugshot

Dallas Police Department

Willie Nelson isn’t your typical outlaw country rebel. While many of his contemporaries love to sing about boozing, the singer’s fondness for a certain green plant has become the stuff of legends. Nelson has been arrested for marijuana possession five times, so clearly, getting busted and booked hasn’t deterred him from toking up. His first arrest happened in Dallas in 1974.

Details about it are scarce, but the mugshot he posed for appears on tons of merchandise online, including a “Free Willie” T-shirt like the one featured in “Grace and Frankie.” Nelson looks scruffy and grizzled, sporting a dark beard and unkempt hair that hasn’t yet grown long enough to braid into those immaculate silver pigtails. He’s also serving some seriously strong stink eye, and something about his expression brings to mind a “wanted” poster from the Old West.

The “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die” singer has launched his own line of marijuana products called Willie’s Reserve, and he’s hopeful that someday everybody in America will be able to smoke his weed without having to worry about getting arrested like he has so many times. “I just feel like it’s becoming more and more acceptable around the country, and it’s legal in a lot of states now,” Nelson told Yahoo! Entertainment in 2023. “And one day I think everybody will wake up and say, ‘Wait a minute, this ain’t that bad,’ you know?”

50 Cent avoided da clink after his arrest

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50 Cent’s hip-hop ascent began with the 1999 song “How to Rob.” But it was selling that got the rapper, whose real name is Curtis James Jackson III, arrested at age 19 in 1994. In his memoir, “From Pieces to Weight: Once Upon a Time in Southside Queens,” Jackson recalls how the police busted down the door of his Queens apartment and discovered his large stash of heroin and crack cocaine. He hadn’t yet launched his hip-hop career, so he had no idea that his mugshot would someday appear alongside those of Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, and Biggie Smalls on the Dogfather’s Instagram page. But the “In Da Club” hitmaker’s piercing gaze made him look so intimidating that we’re surprised he didn’t use the photo for an early album cover; it would have been one way to show the industry that he was a force to be reckoned with.

When he was arrested, Jackson had been dealing drugs since age 12, but because he was still young and lacked a long rap sheet, he was able to avoid jail time by participating in New York’s Shock Incarceration Program. While it wasn’t prison, the bootcamp-like program was no cakewalk. “The instructors knew nothing but discipline and pain and they had a captive audience to experiment with,” Jackson writes in his memoir. After completing the program, he went back to dealing drugs — until he decided he’d rather be a rapper.

Sam Shepard drank too much during a movie discussion

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In 2009, late Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Sam Shepard got pulled over for speeding in Normal, Illinois. A breathalyzer test found that his blood alcohol content was not normal — it was double the legal limit. “The Right Stuff” star’s eyes are bloodshot in his mugshot, and he’s giving the camera a stern look like it’s the one that’s in serious trouble.

The Pantagraph reported that Shepard apologized for his actions during his sentencing hearing and admitted that he found his mugshot rather humiliating. He also spoke about what happened the night of his DUI arrest, revealing that he had too much to drink after stopping at a bar called Fat Jacks. Shepard had become engaged in conversation with some fellow patrons, regaling them with tales from his time shooting the 2001 movie “Black Hawk Down.” He was set to pay fines and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service.

Shepard vowed to never get behind the wheel drunk again, and the following year, he spoke to The Guardian about his sobriety. “Prior to that I was sober for four years and then I relapsed. It’s a constant struggle. It’s such a knucklehead disease because you refuse to see it,” he said. “I think I have that sort of thing in my blood, in my psyche. I can become addicted very easily.”

Amanda Stanton was arrested after a bachelorette party

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department

It’s trendy to have photo booths at bachelorette parties, but after celebrating the end of a friend’s singleton days in 2018, “The Bachelor” star Amanda Stanton left Las Vegas with a different memento: A mugshot. In it, her jaw is set, and she’s shooting daggers at the camera. Her rep, Steve Honig, said that she’d been arrested on a domestic violence charge after hotel security was called on her and her boyfriend at the time, Bobby Jacobs. “That evening she had a few drinks at a bachelorette party and when hotel security asked her and Bobby to quiet down, she got a bit rambunctious,” Honig said in a statement to RadarOnline. “Amanda gave Bobby what she thought was a playful shove; hotel security did their job and reported the incident to the police.”

But Radar obtained a report from the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department that told a different story. Jacobs told officers that Stanton had started hitting, pinching, and scratching him during an argument. She also allegedly struck him with their hotel room’s landline phone. Jacobs said that he turned to some of Stanton’s friends for help calming her down, and they called security when they noticed a number of abrasions on his body.

The charges against Stanton were dismissed, and she and Jacobs split the following year. “To this day, I am still devastated and confused by what happened that night,” Stanton writes in her memoir “Now Accepting Roses.”

The potentially high cost of Ty Dolla Sign’s charge

Fulton County Sheriff's Office

In 2018, Ty Dolla $ign, whose name is Tyrone William Griffin Jr., was prepping for a performance in Atlanta when the vehicle he was in got pulled over. Instead of taking the stage, the “Horses in the Stable” hitmaker found himself getting booked at the Fulton County Jail, per WSB-TV Channel 2. Police had found cocaine and marijuana inside the vehicle and charged Griffin with possession of both, as well as obstructing an officer. So, he had a lot to be ticked off about when his mugshot was being taken; not only was he forced to miss a concert while touring with G-Eazy and Lil Uzi Vert, but he was also looking at doing some serious jail time. The icy stare he’s giving the camera in his booking photo is enough to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Griffin’s attorney, Drew Findling, argued that the charges against his client were unjust because there were other occupants inside the vehicle, and they all escaped charges. Video footage shared by TMZ showed that one of the occupants was the singer’s “Midnight Hour” collaborator Skrillex. “Apparently there was a small amount of some drug in the car and they let five people walk away and the international superstar go into custody,” Findling said to WSB-TV. When Griffin was indicted, TMZ reported that a 15-year prison sentence was one possible outcome. Instead, he was required to enroll in a drug prevention program and “stay away from drugs,” per The Blast.

Lil’ Kim’s arrest during a drug bust at Biggie’s

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Despite her diminutive size, Lil’ Kim has always come off as someone you would not want to get on the wrong side of. And in her 1996 mugshot, Queen Bee looks like she’s about ready to sting somebody for inconveniencing her. The rapper, whose real name is Kimberly Denise Jones, explained to Vibe that she had a good reason for being annoyed about her arrest. She was at the Teaneck, New Jersey, home of her music mentor and lover, Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace, when police barged in.

The aroma of marijuana had been wafting from his residence, and the cops found the drug inside, along with a number of illegal weapons. Jones was charged with possession of marijuana but said, “I wasn’t even smoking. I was upstairs all day sleeping when Five-O shoved guns and a flashlight in my face. When I came downstairs, I didn’t smell anything.” Wallace and multiple other members of his Junior M.A.F.I.A., including James “Lil’ Cease” Lloyd, were arrested as well.

Jones never showed up for court, so an arrest warrant was issued. But in 2003, a detective told The Record of Bergen County (via EastValley.com) that the Teaneck Police Department hadn’t been too concerned about making the rapper face justice during the seven years the warrant was outstanding. “It wasn’t on the top of our priority list,” he said. All it took to get the warrant lifted was a $350 bail payment.

The tragic story behind Lex Luger’s mugshots

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Former professional wrestler Larry Pfohl, who performed under the name Lex Luger, once used a signature move called the “Torture Rack” to take out his opponents, so it probably shouldn’t come as much of a shock that he looks absolutely terrifying in the two mugshots that he had to take in 2003.

The first booking photo was the result of Pfohl allegedly hitting his girlfriend at the time, Elizabeth Hulette, per The Athletic. She was also a WCW wrestler who was known to fans as Miss Elizabeth. Hulette told police that the bruises on her face were from falling while walking the couple’s dogs, but this didn’t protect her boyfriend from being slapped with a domestic violence charge. When Pfohl’s second mugshot was taken the following month, Hulette was dead. She’d taken a lethal combination of pills after drinking vodka.

Upon searching the couple’s Atlanta residence, police discovered dozens of bottles of illegal pills that belonged to Pfohl, and he was arrested on 13 felony charges for controlled substances. So, yeah, he had a good reason to look angry in that second mugshot; instead of mourning Hulette in peace, he was dealing with the police. However, years later, a regretful and sober Pfohl would admit that the sad situation was a consequence of his behavior. “I take a lot of responsibility for that — my influence in her life,” he told ESPN. “Her little heart and body couldn’t take what I was doing.”

Donnie Wahlberg’s stare will make your blood run cold

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Sure, “Blue Bloods” star Donnie Wahlberg can fire-grill a mean Wahlburger these days, but he wasn’t always the safest guy to have around an accelerant and a flame. In 1991, the New Kids on the Block member evidently wanted a taste of the rock star lifestyle. But instead of trashing his hotel room, he allegedly started a fire in a hotel hallway. He was on the ninth floor of Louisville’s historic Seelbach Hotel when he reportedly doused the carpet with vodka and lit it on fire. Wahlberg was arrested on a first-degree arson charge, and according to UPI, the stunt could have landed the bad boy behind bars for up to 20 years. But in his mugshot, Wahlberg looks more angry and defiant than concerned as he glares at the camera.

Wahlberg was given an out: He agreed to film a few PSAs about the perils of playing with fire and other dangerous behavior. After he completed the TV spots, the charges against him were dropped. However, Lieutenant Colonel Mike Gramig of the Louisville Fire Department didn’t think that Wahlberg had the right stuff when it came to teaching kids that setting fire to buildings is wrong. “Our opinion is that Wahlberg met the letter of his requirement, but he certainly didn’t meet the spirit of it,” Gramig said, per The Buffalo News.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues or is dealing with domestic abuse, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).
• The National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233. You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.