Wesley Snipes

The record

Compiled by the MrScandal desk from the documents below · Desk editor Gustavs Ērkšķis-Kreicbergs · Nov 9, 2026

Wesley Snipes won the Coppa Volpi for best actor at the 1997 Venice Film Festival for One Night Stand, according to La Biennale di Venezia's record of the award, which lists Robin Tunney as best actress that year. Besides acting, he owned film production companies including Amen RA Films and Kymberlyte Productions, as the federal appeals court that later heard his tax case described him.

That court's 2010 opinion sets out how the case began. Around 2000 he became involved with American Rights Litigators, an organization run by co-defendant Eddie Ray Kahn that challenged the IRS's authority to collect taxes, mainly with the so-called 861 argument that Americans' domestic earnings are not income. Snipes earned more than $37 million in gross income from 1999 to 2004 and filed no individual federal returns for any of those years, while sending the IRS treatises and altered tax forms.

On February 1, 2008, the jury convicted Kahn and co-defendant Douglas Rosile of conspiracy and a false claim but acquitted Snipes of those counts, convicting him only of willfully failing to file returns for 1999, 2000 and 2001. After his three-year sentence was upheld, he reported to McKean Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania in December 2010 and was released on April 2, 2013, to home confinement that ran to July 19.

Roles and honours on the record

• 1997 Coppa Volpi winner, best actor, Venice Film Festival, One Night Stand source
• as of 2010 Owner of film production companies including Amen RA Films and Kymberlyte Productions source
• 2006-2011 Defendant, United States v. Snipes, M.D. Fla. No. 06-00022-CR-OC-10-GRJ; 11th Cir. No. 08-12402 source