Tim McGraw, Reese Witherspoon and More Stars With Family Members Who Committed Serious Crimes

It’s a celebrity (adjacent) crime wave! See why stars’ law-breaking relatives wound up behind bars.

Woody Harrelson

It’s like something out of a movie! The Natural Born Killers star is the son of an actual mobster and contract killer, though the felon was absent for much of the actor’s childhood. Among several killings attributed to the 63-year-old’s father is the 1979 murder-for-hire of a U.S. district judge on behalf of a drug dealer.

Charles V. Harrelson was sentenced to life in prison and died in 2007. “I tried for years to get him out,” Woody told The Guardian. “To get him a new trial… just being a son trying to help his dad.”

Tim McGraw

The 58-year-old didn’t learn his dad was baseball great Edwin “Tug” McGraw until he stumbled upon his birth certificate at age 11. While they eventually met, his dad denied fathering him until after the country music star turned 18.

Maybe he should have stayed away from his newfound family: According to The Associated Press via My Plainview, in 2003, Tug’s brother Dennis was convicted of first-degree murder in the shooting death of a neighbor and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison!

Billy Bob Thornton

The Oscar winner has been married six times and has four kids, though he is not close to all of them. In 2011, the 69-year-old’s estranged daughter Amanda Brumfield was sentenced to 20 years in prison for aggravated manslaughter for the 2008 death of a child who was in her care, the Palm Beach Post reported. (Amanda’s attorneys argued that the 1-year-old was injured trying to get out of a playpen.) Per The Ledger, she was released in 2020, reportedly with the stipulation that she would stop “pressing her innocence in court.”

Reese Witherspoon

We knew the Legally Blonde star had her own scrape with the law (“You’re about to find out who I am,” the 49-year-old threatened an Atlanta cop who pulled over the actress and then-husband Jim Toth on suspicion of DUI in 2013 via a video obtained by TMZ). Turns out, Reese’s big brother John also has a record.

In 2002, he was charged with entering a female neighbor’s home in Tennessee. According to a sworn affidavit obtained by New York Post, he allegedly “began kissing the victim on the neck and face” without her consent. Charged with sexual battery, a felony, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was placed on two years probation.

Leighton Meester

“My parents had been part of a very interesting lifestyle, I guess you could say,” the 39-year-old once told Ellen DeGeneres during an appearance on her former talk show. You can say that again!

In 1983, the Gossip Girl alum’s mom, Connie, was busted for helping to smuggle 1,200 lbs of marijuana out of Jamaica, and after Leighton’s birth had to spend 16 months behind bars. (Also, Leighton’s aunt broke out of prison and became the first woman in America to get on the U.S. Marshals 15 Most Wanted List!)

Tobey Maguire

Is that why he became the crime-fighting Spider-Man? According to The Independent, in 1993, the 50-year-old’s father, Vincent, was convicted of robbing a bank in Reseda, Calif. No career criminal, he reportedly neglected to wear a mask and was quickly IDed and arrested, then spent two years in the pokey.

Perhaps Vincent was driven by desperation. Tobey once told The Guardian, “As a kid, I was very poor… I always had a roof over my head, but I slept on couches of relatives, and some nights we wandered into a shelter. ”