Matthew McConaughey Reveals 40 Neighbors Witnessed His Naked Bongo Arrest

Actor Matthew McConaughey recounted the infamous moment when he was arrested while naked and playing bongos. He wasn’t alone, but in fact, the occasion was witnessed by 40 of his neighbors.

McConaughey offered an enlightening peek at what really happened during the fabled 1999 arrest in his memoir, “Greenlights.” McConaughey was arrested “on suspicion of possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, and resisting transportation” the Associated Press reported.

The police were called when someone reported a “disturbance” at the actor’s home. That’s when officers found McConaughey “dancing naked and playing the bongo drums.”

McConaughey’s statement after he was released was completely on-brand. “I don’t want to rent a place there, but it was a nice stay for a night,” he said, the AP reported.

Matthew McConaughey said he was just vibing at home

McConaughey shared that he simply wanted to jam at home and relax. “[I] just wanted to smoke a bowl and listen to the beautiful African melodic beats of Henri Dikongué play through my home speakers… It was time for a jam session,” he wrote in his book.

“What I didn’t know was that while I was banging away in my bliss, two Austin policemen also thought it was time to barge into my house unannounced, wrestle me to the ground with nightsticks, handcuff me and pin me to the floor,” he continued.

McConaughey remembers the cop being pompous as he was being arrested. “’Ohhh, looky who we got here,’ the ’roided-up cop with a crew cut, who looked like a Nebraska Cornhusker himself, said as he read the driver’s license he picked up off my coffee table,” he recalled in his book.

“Then he picked up the bong. ‘And looky what we got here Mr. McConaughey, you are under arrest for disturbing the peace, possession of marijuana and resisting arrest,’ he proudly stated while squatting atop me, knee in my back.”

Matthew McConaughey’s plan goes bell up

With the cop on his back, McConaughey resisted arrest. “F*** you, motherf***er! You broke in my house! F***, yeah, I resisted!” he wrote. When the officers tried to cover him up during the arrest, McConaughey wasn’t having it.

“’Ohhhh no!’ I barked,” he shared. “‘I’m not putting s**t on! My naked a** is proof I was mindin’ my own business!’ They escorted me out of my house through the courtyard entry on the way to the street. Still naked and reluctant to submit to the inevitability of my predicament, I got relative, and decided it would be a clever idea to run up the walls left and right of the gated passageway and do a somersault backflip over the Cornhusker cop who was guiding me from behind.” 

His plan went south and he ended up getting slammed. “Before I’d taken three steps up the wall, the Cornhusker body-slammed me back down onto the brick footpath,” he wrote. And as he walked out of his home he saw “six lit-up cop cars and about 40 of my neighbors.”