LOS ANGELES — A man was charged today with trying to coerce actor Kevin Hart to pay him for a video that was surreptitiously recorded last year, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office announced.
Jonathan Todd Jackson, 41, aka Action Jackson, was charged with one count each of attempted extortion and extortion by threatening letter.
Jackson is accused of trying to extort an undisclosed amount of money from Hart between Aug. 25 and Aug. 30, 2017. Jackson allegedly had a videotape of the actor with a woman in Las Vegas and then is accused of trying to sell the recording to numerous celebrity news websites, prosecutors said.
TMZ posted the video.
Hart later apologized in an Insatgram video: “I’m at a place in my life where I feel like I have a target on my back,” he said in the video. “And I made a bad error in judgement and I put myself in a bad environment where only bad things can happen and they did. And in doing that I know that I’m going to hurt the people closest to me, who’ve I talked to and apologized to, that would be my wife and my kids.”
Prosecutors are recommending bail be set at $100,000. If convicted as charged, Jackson faces a possible maximum sentence of four years in county jail.
