Justin Timberlake is seeking a legal injunction to prevent a Hamptons police department from releasing officer bodycam footage from his DWI arrest two years ago.
The lawsuit, filed in a Long Island branch of New York state court on Monday (March 2), asks a judge to maintain the confidentiality of Sag Harbor Village Police Department footage from Timberlake’s June 2024 arrest on suspicion of driving while intoxicated. The singer ultimately pled guilty to a lesser impaired driving charge and was sentenced to 25 hours of community service.
According to court papers, Sag Harbor police have been planning to grant an unnamed media outlet’s public records request and hand over eight hours of bodycam video from that night, including footage of Timberlake completing a field sobriety test and sitting in custody for the next several hours. His lawyers say this would be an “unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”
“The footage at issue depicts petitioner in an acutely vulnerable state during a roadside encounter with law enforcement, capturing intimate details of petitioner’s physical appearance, demeanor, speech and conduct,” reads the petition. “Public dissemination of this footage would cause severe and irreparable harm to petitioner’s personal and professional reputation, subject petitioner to public ridicule and harassment, and serve no legitimate public interest in understanding the operations of government.”
While the police allegedly plan to redact certain parts of this footage, Timberlake’s lawyers claim to still be in the dark about what exactly will be made public. They want an immediate injunction blocking the release, or at least allowing them a chance to weigh in on redactions first.
“Once the footage is released to the requestor(s) and disseminated online or through media, the disclosure cannot be undone,” the petition says. “Digital copies can be replicated indefinitely, beyond the court’s ability to retrieve or control, rendering any subsequent relief inadequate.”
A lawyer representing the Village of Sag Harbor, Vincent Toomey, said in a statement to Billboard that the municipality received a request for the video footage under New York’s Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) and “had indicated its intention to comply with the FOIL request by releasing some of the footage, with certain redactions, based upon personal privacy and law enforcement interference exemptions.”
Toomey said an initial court conference was held in the case on Monday afternoon before Judge Joseph Farneti, who held off on issuing any formal orders for the time being.
Reps for Timberlake did not immediately return a request for comment.
