The police officer didn’t know who Justin Timberlake was. That was probably the worst part of it. When the beleaguered pop star was pulled over by traffic cops in the Hamptons yesterday – he now faces a charge of driving while intoxicated – the arresting officer allegedly didn’t recognise him. Not even when he worried about its effect on his current world tour. “What tour?” the officer asked.
Whether much of this happened is unclear, credited only to “sources” in US tabloid The New York Post. A mysterious source who was potentially Britney Spears speaking in a British accent – who is to say? But it’s been gleefully repeated across the internet regardless, another apparently deserved blow to a man who has spent the past few years not as a singer or an actor, but as the internet’s favourite punching bag. His arrest, and the subsequent release of his pale, mortified mugshot, is just further ammunition. And proof that no one quite knows what to do with a pop superstar stuck in that difficult netherworld between young, blockbuster superstardom and nostalgic, late-in-life reappraisal. It begs a simple question: what are we to do with Justin Timberlake?
