North Carolina man arrested for failing to return VHS copy of Freddy Got Fingered

By Katie Rife  |  March 24, 2016 | 11:15pm
Aux Features Film
North Carolina man arrested for failing to return VHS copy of Freddy Got Fingered

Depending on how much of a stoner your manager is, working at a video store can sometimes be more like working at a collection agency. If you’re unlucky, and Todd is really motivated to get that regional manager position so he can finally get the windshield replaced on his ’97 Camry, you may find your precious movie-watching and debating time being eaten up with calling customers with delinquent accounts and threatening them with loss of rental privileges—or, worse, the “fullest extent of the law”—if they don’t bring back that Meet Joe Black DVD.

Of course, all that stuff about getting the authorities involved is just hot air. You’re not really going to call the cops on someone for not returning a movie rental. Except someone apparently did, because North Carolina’s WSOC-TV reports on a man who was recently arrested for not returning the VHS copy of Freddy Got Fingered he rented 14 years earlier.

The video store he rented it from, J&J’s Video, closed in 2014. But apparently an arrest warrant, filed in 2002, for charges of failing to return rental property was still on James Meyers’ record. Here, we’ll let him tell the story:

After reporting to his local magistrate’s office, Meyers says he was put in handcuffs, although he was later released. Later that night, thanks to the video posted above, Meyers got an unexpected phone call. It was Tom Green, who had heard about the story on Twitter and who did the best thing a famous person can do in this sort of situation: He quoted his own movie at him. He says so at the three-minute, 31-second mark:


Green also said that he would be happy to pay Meyers’ legal fees, as long as they’re not, like, crazy. (It’s not 2002 anymore for Tom Green, either, to be fair.) As of yesterday, the charge had not yet been dropped, and Meyers is scheduled to appear in court next month.

 
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