Darius Rucker Speaks Out After Arrest for Misdemeanor Drug Charges: ‘It Is What It Is’

Darius Rucker is speaking out about his February arrest, which found the country star facing two misdemeanor charges related to an instance of alleged drug possession more than a year ago.

While promoting his new memoir Life’s Too Short on TODAY Tuesday (May 28), Rucker recounted how he was initially pulled over in Tennessee in 2023 while helping a friend who was moving, who had asked the musician to “take some stuff.” According to the “Wagon Wheel” singer, the police officer who stopped him at the time had allegedly discovered that there were drugs with him in the vehicle, but let him off the hook anyway.

“The crazy thing was, they let me go,” the Hootie & the Blowfish frontman said during his interview with NBC’s long-running morning show. “It was a year later that I get a phone call that said there was a warrant for my arrest. I went down, we handled it, my lawyers are taking care of it. It is what it is.”

Rucker didn’t divulge any more details about Williamson County’s case against him, but did confirm that the charges are still pending.

The interview comes about four months after news broke that Rucker had been arrested and was facing two counts of simple possession and casual exchange of a controlled substance, along with a third misdemeanor charge for expired tags on his vehicle. At the time, his attorney, Mark Puryear, said in a statement to Billboard that the singer was “fully cooperating with authorities related to misdemeanor charges.”

In another recent interview with People, Rucker expressed that he’s still confused by the year-long wait between the moment he was actually pulled over and his arrest. “My friends who were in the police department were like, ‘Have you pissed somebody off up here? Because this is crazy that they’re doing this a year later,’” he told the publication. “But I think somebody wanted to make an example out of me, and they did. And I’m handling it with my lawyers, and paying the price, and we’ll move on with our lives.”

Watch Rucker open up to TODAY about his arrest below.