Remember in August how Dennis Rodman denied being involved in a wrong-way crash on the 5 freeway in Santa Ana the month before?
Today, The Worm pleaded guilty to doing just that.
Specifically, the former NBA star copped to three misdemeanors: driving a motor vehicle across a dividing section, giving false information to a police officer and driving a motor vehicle without a valid license.
As part of “a civil compromise between the defendant and the victim,” the court dismissed a misdemeanor count of hit and run with property damage, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s office.
The 55-year-old sometime Newport Beach resident was sentenced to three years of informal probation, 30 hours of community service and orders to pay restitution and donate $500 to the Victim Witness Emergency Fund.
Around 12:30 a.m. on July 20, a luxury SUV was heading the wrong direction in the freeway’s southbound carpool lane near Main Street, causing a BMW driver to swerve out of the way and into the concrete divider. Questioned by responding California Highway Patrol officers, the Beemer driver said the SUV driver appeared to be Dennis Rodman and that he got back into his ride and drove away after the wreck.
During an Atlantic City, New Jersey, book signing on Aug. 5, Rodman denied he’d been involved in a hit-and-run. “Life is good–that’s why I’ve never been charged,” the NBA Hall of Famer reportedly told The Associated Press. “Guess what? Nothing happened. There was no wreck, there was no injuries, there was no nothing, so I guess it’s going on hearsay.”
But a CHP investigation determined Rodman was the SUV driver and that there was a wreck. “The defendant gave verbal false accounts to investigating officers,” according to an OCDA conviction statement.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.