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Aug. 1 (UPI) -- Louisiana authorities are holding rapper Michael Tyler, best known by his stage name Mystikal, on several sexual misconduct charges without bond after responding to an assault over the weekend. The Ascension Parish Sheriff's Office said on Saturday that Tyler is facing first-degree rape, simple robbery, domestic abuse battery, false imprisonment and simple criminal damage to property charges.
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The sheriff's office said the charges came after deputies started an investigation at a local hospital involving a sexual assault. The victim sustained minor injuries in the attack.
Tyler shot to the national music scene with hits in the 1990s and his 2000 album "Let's Get Ready" sold more than one million copies. He was also nominated for two Grammy awards in 2003.
His career, though, stalled over a series of run-ins with the law. He pleaded guilty in 2003 to forcing his hairstylist to perform what a judge called "continuous sex acts," in July 2002 at the rapper's then Baton Rouge apartment.
Tyler served a six-year term in state prison for sexual battery and extortion in state prison and was released in 2010, forcing him to register as a lifetime sex offender, the most serious level under Louisiana law.
A judge ordered Tyler back in prison for three months after he was arrested in 2012 on a misdemeanor domestic abuse count in Ascension.
He then pleaded guilty to two federal misdemeanor counts of failing to file tax returns on earnings of nearly $2 million in 1998 and 1999.
In 2018, a Shreveport grand jury charged Tyler and another man with first-degree rape and second-degree kidnapping charges but the charges were dropped in December 2020 after a second grand jury declined to charge Tyler a second time.
