Hill was on May 5th sentenced in a Newark court. In court, she told the judge she had intended to pay her taxes eventually but was unable to do so when she dropped out of the music business to focus on her children. She is to report to prison on July 8th. The judge also sentenced her to an additional three months of home confinement after her release.
Hill’s attorney said she had paid about $970,000 to satisfy her unpaid state and federal tax bills, as well as penalties on the eve of her sentencing, nearly two weeks after United States Magistrate Judge Madeline Cox Arleo had scolded her in court for being slow to square her accounts with the government.
She had pleaded guilty last year to charges that she had failed to file tax returns from 2005 to 2007, despite owning four companies and taking in more than $1.8 million in gross revenues, according to the complaint against her.
Hill rose to prominence on the music scene as the front woman of the hip-hop group Fugees. In 1998, she launched her solo career with the release of the critically successful and 19-million-copy-selling album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.
The album earned Hill five Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year and Best New Artist. To date, she has won a total of eight Grammys.
Following the success of her debut album, Hill co-produced the commercially successful Supernatural for Carlos Santana, in 1999, for which she won another Grammy for Album of the Year. This made her the only female artist to win two Album of the Year Grammys consecutively and set a record for most Album of the Year wins by a female artist (tied with Norah Jones).
Shortly after that, she dropped out of public view for the most part, in part due to her displeasure with fame and the music industry. After a four-year hiatus, she released MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, a live recording of “deeply personal songs” performed mostly solo with an acoustic guitar.
In recent years, she has recorded songs for soundtracks and mixtapes, as well as performing live at several music festivals, such as Coachella. She has also collaborated with artists, such as Ronald Isley, and Joss Stone.
Hill has six children, five of whom are with Rohan Marley, son of Jamaican-born reggae legend, the late Robert Nesta Marley.
