LOS ANGELES (AP) - Lindsay Lohan arrived Thursday at a Los Angeles courthouse to await a hearing that could give her something she hasn’t had for nearly two years: true freedom.
Lohan will update a judge on her progress on strict probation requirements that have had her doing cleanup duty at the county morgue and attending regular psychotherapy sessions since late last year.
Superior Court Judge Stephanie Sautner has said she will end Lohan’s probation on a 2007 drunken driving case on Thursday if she completes the requirements, which the actress has apparently done.
Lohan, 25, arrived about 15 minutes before the scheduled hearing. Her attorney, Shawn Holley, arrived ahead of her and was meeting with the judge and prosecutors in chambers before the hearing.
The “Mean Girls” star would remain on informal probation for taking a necklace without permission, but she will no longer be supervised by a probation officer and judge, and no longer be forced to live in Los Angeles, where the actress still faces civil lawsuits over accidents and bad behavior.
The hearing comes as Lohan’s career is showing hints of a comeback. She is due to guest star on an upcoming episode of “Glee,” recently hosted a highly rated but criticized episode of “Saturday Night Live” and is set to star as Elizabeth Taylor in a television movie.
“Lindsay is ending one chapter and starting the next,” her spokesman, Steve Honig said. “She is very eager to get back on set and dive into her next few projects.”
Roles have been hard to come by for Lohan in recent years, as she has been in-and-out of courtrooms, spent time in rehab and was sentenced to jail.
Her failure to complete alcohol education classes in 2010 prompted a judge to sentence her to jail for the first time since the actress served 84 minutes for a pair of drunken driving arrests in 2007. A court-ordered rehab stint was cut short, but Lohan relapsed before year’s end and was sent by another judge to the Betty Ford Center, where she was involved in a fight with a rehab worker.
Within three weeks of her release in January 2011, Lohan was accused of stealing a $2,500 necklace from a store near her Venice home and soon landed in Sautner’s court. The judge rejected rehab and tried to send Lohan to jail as punishment. Overcrowding reduced a November 2011 sentence to a few hours, although the actress did serve 35 days on house arrest earlier in the year.
Lohan is far from the only celebrity to encounter trouble complying with the terms of alcohol-related cases and ending up in jail. Fellow female celebrities such as Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Khloe Kardashian have all been sentenced to jail and faced multiple court hearings because they didn’t properly comply with their sentences. All their cases have long since ended.
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Anthony McCartney can be reached at https://twitter.com/mccartneyAP
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