The former child star was a passenger, not the driver, in a car reportedly pulled over for sitting at a green light and blocking traffic near Malibu.
Jonathan Taylor Thomas spent a night in a Malibu jail cell this week after an arrest that started, oddly enough, with someone else's traffic stop.
According to TMZ, whose reporting was cited by Perez Hilton and several other outlets on Wednesday, the Home Improvement star was a passenger in a car that deputies pulled over in Westlake Village early Monday morning. The driver was being investigated for a possible DUI. Taylor Thomas, sources told TMZ, was not behind the wheel.
What happened next is where the trouble started. A statement given to People magazine from law enforcement lays out the sequence: "The driver was being detained for DUI investigation. Sometime during the investigation, Mr. Taylor decided he would exit the vehicle. Deputies told him to sit back down in the vehicle. He was uncooperative with them, failed to follow orders, and obstructed the investigation, so he was arrested for obstruction, and he was arrested for [suspicion of being] drunk in public."
There's also a question of why the car got stopped in the first place. A report obtained by E! News claims the vehicle had been sitting at an intersection "with a green light blocking traffic," which is what drew deputy attention in the first place.
Things escalated from there, per TMZ's sheriff's department sources. During his alleged refusal to comply, Taylor Thomas is said to have kicked a deputy in the stomach. That's when the arrest happened, on suspicion of obstruction and public intoxication.
He was booked and held at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff's Station jail. He walked out the next day.
No formal charges have been detailed in the reporting so far, and Taylor Thomas himself hasn't said a word publicly. Given how thin the official record still is, that silence matters. Everything about the kick, the non-compliance, even the exact wording of what deputies told him, comes from sources speaking to TMZ and a law enforcement statement given to People. None of it has been tested in a courtroom, and it shouldn't be treated as settled until it is.
Taylor Thomas, now in his mid-40s, has mostly stayed out of the spotlight since his Home Improvement days, popping up occasionally in interviews or nostalgia pieces rather than active projects. This is the kind of story that will follow him regardless of what he's working on next.
What happens now depends on the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and whatever the district attorney's office decides to do with the obstruction and public intoxication allegations. Until there's a charging decision or a statement from Taylor Thomas's camp, the version on record is the deputies' account, nothing more.
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