WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — Christina Aguilera has been released from jail after being arrested for being drunk in public, and authorities don't plan to seek criminal charges.
Los Angeles County sheriff's Deputy Bill McSweeney says the 30-year-old singer was in a car driven by her boyfriend that was stopped on a West Hollywood street at about 2:45 a.m. Tuesday.
Twenty-five-year-old Matthew Rutler was booked on suspicion of driving under the influence. He remains jailed on $30,000 bail.
McSweeney says Aguilera appeared extremely intoxicated and incapable of driving home, so she was taken to the West Hollywood sheriff's station and held until she sobered up.
McSweeney says Aguilera was released out a back gate around 7:30 a.m., avoiding paparazzi at the front.
Calls to her agent and publicist weren't returned early Tuesday.
Christina Aguilera's public woes continued early Tuesday morning (March 1), when the singer was arrested in Los Angeles on a misdemeanor charge of public intoxication after police pulled over her boyfriend on suspicion of driving under the influence.
A spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's department confirmed that officers observed Aguilera's 25-year-old boyfriend Matthew Rutler driving in a manner that made them believe he was under the influence at around 2:45 a.m. on Tuesday. Aguilera was a passenger in the vehicle, and sheriff's department spokesperson Nicole Nishida said that the 30-year-old singer was "so intoxicated she couldn't take care of herself" and was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of suspicion of public drunkenness.
Aguilera was booked into the West Hollywood sheriff's station and released on $250 bail. A spokesperson for the singer could not be reached for comment at press time. An arrest report stated that Rutler was also booked on a misdemeanor charge of suspicion of driving under the influence at the West Hollywood station just before 3 a.m., with bail set at $30,000. It was not known at press time if Rutler had been released on bail.
An anonymous source told TMZ that if "the driver had NOT been arrested for DUI, [Christina] would have never been in trouble." Another unnamed source allegedly close to the singer told the site that her confidants have been trying to get the performer into a rehab facility for several weeks.
Aguilera's personal life and career have been on a slide over the past year, beginning with the flop of her Bionic album, which has sold only 250,000 copies in the U.S. to date. That was followed by a hastily canceled U.S. tour, the disappointing returns for her big-screen debut in "Burlesque" and her divorce from husband Jordan Bratman.
Those incidents were followed by her infamous flubbing of the national anthem at February's Super Bowl and a stumble on the Grammys stage a week later, amid tabloid reports that her partying had gotten out of hand.
