Why did Ja Rule spend two years in prison?
Ja Rule has experienced his fair share of troubles with the law over the years, even spending a couple of years behind bars.
Ja was fined in 2003 for punching someone in Canada, before being arrested the following year for getting caught driving with a suspended license and for carrying weed. A more serious arrest occurred in 2007, when he was pulled over for speeding and, consequently, was caught in possession of a firearm.
This gun case hung over Ja for years, but, at the end of 2010, he received the dreaded verdict. Having pleaded guilty to attempted criminal possession of a weapon, he was sentenced to two years in prison. His stint was scheduled to begin in June 2011, whereupon he gave himself up and went to jail in New York.
Things duly got even worse for him. The following month, in July, Ja received an extra 28-month sentence. He’d failed to file his income tax returns, with the man himself admitting to not paying taxes on more than $3 million in earnings between 2004 and 2006.
“I in no way attempted to deceive the government or do anything illegal,” he reportedly told the court. “I was a young man who made a lot of money—I’m getting a little choked up—I didn’t know how to deal with these finances, and I didn’t have people to guide me, so I made mistakes.”
Ja’s sentence for tax evasion, while very serious, was at least set to run alongside his initial sentence. Practically speaking, that meant he would end up spending some additional months behind bars than he’d initially expected. But it wasn’t 28 months on top of the initial two-year sentence.
In February 2013, Ja was released from state prison—but rather than walking free, he was taken into federal custody because of his tax offenses. There was still a little under six months of that sentence to go.
Ja Rule was incarcerated in a detention centre in Brooklyn with a release date set for the end of July 2013. He ended up being released a couple of months early, walking free in May.
A free man now, this would not prove to be Ja Rule’s last brush with the law. He was subject to several lawsuits following the disaster of his failed Fyre Festival, which he organised alongside Billy McFarland, although the charges against him were eventually dropped in 2019. Later, in 2024, he was blocked from entering the UK, with his criminal record being cited as the reason.