Saying she overreacted, actress Taraji P. Henson apologized Friday to the Glendale police officer whom she accused of racially profiling her 20-year-old son, Marcell Johnson.
The 40-minute video obtained by the Los Angeles Times shows that Glendale police followed proper procedure when Marcell Johnson was pulled over on Oct. 18 for driving through a lighted crosswalk while a pedestrian was walking on it.
After obtaining permission from Johnson to search his car, police found weed, hash oil, marijuana, a small knife and a grinder. The police determined that the knife was legal.
But in an interview with Essence magazine, Taraji said the police officers pulled her son over in a racial profiling incident and illegally searched his car.
After the LA Times published video on Friday showing the officer did nothing wrong, Taraji, 44, apologized on her Instagram page.
“I would like to apologize to the officer and the Glendale Police Department,” Henson wrote. “A mother’s job is not easy and neither is a police officer’s. Sometimes as humans we over react without gathering all the facts. As a mother in this case I over reacted and for that I apologize. Thank you to that officer for being kind to my son.”
Taraji previously said she had planned to send her son to USC but she changed her mind and decided to enroll him at Howard University, an HBCU in Washington, D.C. instead.
She told Essence magazine she was “not paying $50K so I can’t sleep at night wondering, ‘Is this the night my son is getting racially profiled on campus?’”
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