‘1000-lb Sisters’ Star Amy Slaton-Halterman Learned From Her 2010 Arrest
Updated Feb. 15 2021, 2:21 p.m. ET
Star of 1000-lb Sisters Amy Slaton-Halterman was arrested a decade before the TLC show debuted — and she detailed the whole saga on YouTube in 2017, calling her misdeed “a big mistake.”
“This is a story about when I was arrested,” she began in the video, which currently has more than 52,000 views. “Yes, this is [an] age-restricted [video] because I do not want little kids to go out and think it’s OK to steal and get in trouble and stuff like that. I do not want that to happen. Please do not do the dumb things that I’ve done in life. I did stupid things when I was younger.”
Amy tried stealing a book from a Walmart store.
In the video, Amy then detailed her crime: “It was 2010. I had a job, but I had recently quit my job. My grandpa died and everything like that, so everything was going bad for me. And I really wanted this book, and I thought, ‘Well, I’m gonna try to steal it.’ So, I put it in my purse, and when I walked out the door of Walmart, the [anti-theft device] beeped.”
Amy tried lying about her shoplifting — and ended up in jail for two hours.
When an employee confronted Amy about her shoplifting, she claimed she purchased the book at another store. “And he checked the cameras, and he was like, ‘Well, you’re lying. We called the cops,’” she recalled. “He was like, ‘Well, if you didn’t lie to me, I wouldn’t have ever called the cops. If you would have told me to the truth, I would have let you go with a warning.’”
A cop arrived and took Amy to the station. “I thought I was going to cry,” she told viewers in the YouTube video. “I ain’t gonna lie. I thought I was gonna bawl like a baby when I was arrested. But I didn’t. … But yeah, he took to the police station, and they took my prints, they asked me how many tattoos and piercings and all that crazy s--t, and they took my mugshot, and y’all have probably seen it. I was a lot skinnier then.”
“But yeah, I guess they put me in the drunk tank, and I stayed in there for two hours, and my mom came and got me, and that was the end of that,” she added. “I was only in jail for two hours.”
An $8 book ended up costing Amy $400.
After a court date, Amy was charged a $400 fine.
“Now the price of the book originally was $8,” she said in the video. “Eight dollars, OK? And this $8 book turned into $400. So, be advised if you are a little kid and you’re watching this: There are consequences. But yeah, that was my shoplifting story. I was not allowed to go to Walmart for two years afterward, and it was kind of hard for two years afterward because that was the only big store in that town, you know?”
She has moved on from her mistake.
In the YouTube clip, Amy said she’s trying to keep the shoplifting incident in her rear-view mirror.
“We all have a past, and we all have learned from it and moved on from it,” she said. “And I don’t think that my past should be an issue. I mean, yeah, some of y’all have been in jail for worse stuff than I have, but one book, and I’m branded for life on the YouTube community.”
That said, she’s also not trying to hide her arrest. “I have told people before on YouTube that I have gotten arrested before,” she said earlier in the video. “So I wasn’t trying to hide it from people or anything like that, so don’t think that. But I always learn from my mistakes, and this was a big mistake. And I’ve never done it again, and I never will do it again.”