This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Legal
Dappy avoids prison following nightclub assault #2
By Aly Barchi | Published on Friday 7 November 2014
Entertainer and bane-of-UK-nightclubs Dappy will not, it transpires, go to prison over his latest assault conviction. You know, the one involving him punching a man in the face at Reading nightspot Evissa last year. Appearing at Guildford Crown Court yesterday, the one-time N-Dubz star, real name Costadinos Contostavlos, was given a two month sentence suspended for twelve months.
Though, whilst Dappy won’t face jail time, he will have to pay his victim, one Devonn Reid, £800 in compensation, as well as a £800 fine and £1,200 costs, and an £80 surcharge on top of that. Costs he is apparently financing – his defence barrister Jon Harrison said yesterday – along with significant debts, by selling his house.
Contostavlos is also obliged to stick to an electronically-monitored 10pm-5am curfew for four months and take part in a ‘thinking skills programme’.
As previously reported, Dappy’s latest sentencing was adjourned last month after a judge ruled that the matter should be settled at the Guildford court, because the latest incident occurred while the rapper was already serving a suspended sentence from another assault tried in the Surrey town. The judge hearing the new case reckoned that the judge who heard the Guildford case should decide whether it was now time for Dappy to go to jail.
But Guildford Crown Court judge Neil Stewart yesterday decided not to activate that previous suspended sentence, dishing out the new suspended jail term and the other penalties instead.
