Pras Michel, the Fugees member who was convicted in 2023 of charges including money laundering, illegal lobbying, and campaign finance violations, turned himself in to the Federal Correctional Institution in Safford, Arizona, where he will begin a 14-year prison sentence.
“Today is a painful day for Pras, for his family, and for everyone who believes in a fair system of justice,” Michel’s spokesperson, Erica Dumas, said in a statement. “Pras honors the legal process as he reports to begin his sentence. The FARA-related charges that led to his conviction are being vigorously contested on appeal, and his legal team believes the record will show that his rights were violated and the truth was obscured. This chapter is difficult but it is not his final one.”
A judge initially told Michel to begin his sentence in January but delayed it to March. The judge subsequently gave him another 30 days, making April 30 the day he needed to surrender himself. “He has to fight it on the inside,” Dumas tells Rolling Stone. “His appeal is in the very beginning stages. As you can imagine, it’s a very complicated case with lots of files.”
Dumas says that Michel has spent the time before his sentence with his family. “He doesn’t really go out,” she says. “He’s vegan, he doesn’t drink, and he doesn’t smoke.” His big outing recently, though, was Kanye West’s April 3 concert in Los Angeles, where Dumas says he hung out in a suite with Dave Chappelle and Eryka Badu and sang along with Lauryn Hill when she was onstage as West’s guest. In 2023, Michel appeared with his fellow Fugees at reunion dates, eventually distancing himself from Hill and Wyclef Jean, but Dumas noted thast Michel sang along to one of Hill’s songs. Michel dropped a suit against Hill in March.
Federal prosecutors indicted Michel in 2019, accusing him of making illegal contributions to President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. They later expanded the charges to include bank fraud, concealment of material facts, witness tampering, violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and acting as an unregistered agent of the People’s Republic of China. Rolling Stone reported that the charges stemmed from Michel’s association with Low Taek Jho, a Malaysian financier who’d been accused of stealing $4.5 billion from a state fund. The DOJ claimed Michel used some of that money to lobby the Trump administration to stop investigating the financier.
Eric Rojas*
