Comedian Sherri Shepherd sat down with Jalen Rose on his “Renaissance Man” podcast and told him about a financial predicament from early in her career. She told Rose that she wasn’t paying her bills before she got famous and was arrested one night on her way to do a comedy show in Los Angeles.
“I wasn’t paying my bills,” Shepherd told Rose. “I was in a religion that was like, I felt the end of the world was coming, and so I didn’t pay any of my bills.”
It is obvious that the end of the world never came, but her days of not paying her bills did come to an end. Shepherd explained that police arrested her in front of the Los Angeles comedy club Comedy Store.
“I had $10,000 worth of unpaid moving violations,” Sherri confessed. “When they give you a ticket on a moving violation, if you don’t show up in court, it’s a bench warrant.”
“So $10,000, with a bench warrant, they caught me. They got me on a Friday, which was Martin Luther King weekend.”
She was allowed one phone call, which she made to her mom. Shepherd asked her mom to call the office where she worked as a legal secretary during that time.
“I said, ‘Can you tell them I need to take my vacation, because I’m going to be here for a minute,’ ” Shepherd recalled.
She spent eight days behind bars and says the other female inmates refused to let anything happen to her.
“One of the girls in jail said, ‘Leave Sherri alone because she’s gonna be somebody and we are going to be here for the rest of our lives.’ Literally that’s what she used to say,” Shepherd said.
Shepherd also said the woman name was Shelby and the two developed a relationship throughout the years.
“Her name was Shelby and she came to both my weddings when I got out. But sometimes people see things in you that you don’t see yourself, and when she said those words, ‘Sherri is gonna be somebody,’ I never thought that for myself. So I just knew that something was going to happen,” said Shepherd.
She clearly learned from that moment and went on to become a successful stand-up comedian, actress, and now talk-show host.
Shepherd is best known for roles on shows like “The Jamie Foxx Show” and the ABC sitcom “Less Than Perfect.” She also was a former co-host of the daytime talk show “The View.”
Now Shepherd has launched her own daytime talk show that filled Wendy Williams’ time slot because her show was canceled after she was not able to return for health reasons.
