A federal judge in Philadelphia has ordered ‘Empire’ actor Terrence Howard to pay nearly $1 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties after he allegedly threatened a Justice Department lawyer and maintained that it was “immoral for the United States government to charge taxes to the descendants of slaves.”


Terrence reportedly avoided efforts by the IRS to collect $578,000 in income taxes they say he failed to pay between 2010 and 2019. The Justice Department sued him in 2022.


Despite a months-long effort to engage Howard in court after the Justice Department sued him in 2022, the actor’s only response was a voicemail he allegedly left on the phone of the case’s lead tax attorney in November.


According to Philly Inquirer, the actor responded with a voicemail sent to the case’s lead tax attorney. “Four hundred years of forced labor and never receiving any compensation for it,” Terrence said in the message per a court transcript. “Now you have the gall to try and prosecute and charge taxes to the descendants of a broken people that you are responsible for causing the breakage.”


The recording cut Howard off midsentence, but he called the attorney back to continue.


“In truth, the entire United States should, by default, become the property of the descendants of slaves,” he said. “But since you do not have the ability [or] the courage to do it, let’s try this in court. … We’re gonna bring you down.”


Despite that vow, Howard never formally responded to the lawsuit. And after a court hearing last week in Philadelphia, U.S. District Judge John F. Murphy granted the government’s request to enter a $903,115 default judgment against the actor, a ruling that was first reported by the legal news service Law360.