YoungBoy Never Broke Again, one of the most-streamed hip-hop artists in the United States, has been sentenced to nearly two years in prison by a federal judge in Utah for possessing weapons as a felon.
The rapper, whose real name is Kentrell D. Gaulden, was sentenced Tuesday to 23 months in prison on gun charges related to a case in Louisiana. Gaulden, 25, was also sentenced to five years of probation and fined $200,000 for a gun charge in a separate Utah case.
Federal law bars gun ownership by felons. In 2017, Gaulden was convicted of aggravated assault with a firearm, a felony, in a Louisiana court. Details of that case could not be independently confirmed Wednesday.
In a plea agreement filed in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Gaulden said that he had been in possession of three guns since his earlier felony conviction.
In the first instance, Gaulden admitted to possessing two guns while filming a music video in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in September 2020. In the second, a semi-automatic pistol was found in a bedroom of his Utah home during a search, according to the plea agreement.
He faced a maximum prison sentence of 10 years in the Louisiana case and 15 years in the Utah case.
“This has been a long road that involved extensive litigation and ultimately extensive negotiation,” Gaulden’s lawyers said in a statement Wednesday. “Kentrell’s defense team is very happy for Kentrell and we look forward to his many future successes.”
Gaulden, who is best known as NBA YoungBoy, has legions of dedicated fans. Many of his songs have received hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify and YouTube.
But he has a history of legal problems.
In 2022, Gaulden was found not guilty in a similar gun possession case in California. Police in the Los Angeles area had found a pistol and ammunition in the car he was driving. His lawyers argued that he did not know that the weapon was in the car at the time, and that his fingerprints were not found on the gun.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
