Faizon Love is in trouble with the law again, and this time it has nothing to do with hotel lobbies or airport baggage claims. The 58-year-old “Friday” and “Elf” actor was taken into custody Tuesday, June 16, in Hillsborough County, Florida, and booked into a Tampa jail on two counts of contempt of court. which obtained his booking photo. The outlet reports the charges stem from an ongoing paternity case, though full details of what triggered the contempt finding haven’t been made public yet.
It’s the latest entry in what’s become a string of legal headaches for the comedian over the past few years, and it lands while he’s still waiting to face a much more serious case on the other side of the country.
That case dates back to August 2024, when Love allegedly ripped a credit card reader off the front desk at a Sheraton hotel in San Diego’s Mission Valley neighborhood and hurled it at a clerk who told him the property had no room for him despite a third-party booking. Prosecutors say the device struck her in the head hard enough to break her glasses and cause a concussion. At a July 2025 preliminary hearing, the clerk testified about how fast things escalated, telling the court, “Mr. Love was extremely upset. It was zero to 100 real quick,” according to NBC San Diego. A San Diego judge found enough evidence to send the case to trial, and Love was charged with felony assault with a deadly weapon plus a great-bodily-injury enhancement, a combination that carries up to seven years in prison. He’s pleaded not guilty, and the case was slated for trial in January 2026.
Love addressed the case in an interview with VladTV around the same time, saying he didn’t realize the charge had been upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony until he was already in court, and that he’s been in psychiatric treatment ahead of trial. He’s also pointed to his attorney’s defense strategy, which leaned on body camera footage to poke holes in the clerk’s account and that of two coworkers who backed her up.
This isn’t Love’s first run-in with the law, either. Back in 2017, he was arrested in Columbus, Ohio, after grabbing a valet by the neck and throwing him to the ground at John Glenn Columbus International Airport, an incident caught on video. He ultimately pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault and got hit with a fine and a suspended jail sentence.
Love has also faced trouble outside the criminal courts. A former personal assistant, Hevekiah Walker, sued him and his company in 2022 alleging sexual harassment during her time working in his Georgia home. When Love never responded to the complaint, a judge entered a default judgment against him for roughly $543,000 with interest and costs. The fallout didn’t stop there: Walker later went after NBCUniversal directly to garnish residuals owed to Love, and when the network missed its own deadlines to respond, a court hit NBCUniversal with a matching default judgment, which the company has since tried to appeal.
With the Florida contempt case now added to the mix and the San Diego felony trial still looming, Love’s legal situation looks more tangled than ever.
