Australian actor and director Simon Baker, best known for his role as Patrick Jane in the TV series The Mentalist, avoided a conviction on Wednesday (Sep 11) after pleading guilty to a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol near his rural home.
The 55-year-old appeared in the Mullumbimby Local Court in New South Wales state for sentencing after pleading guilty the week before to a charge of driving with a blood-alcohol concentration exceeding the legal limit of 0.05 per cent.
Baker acted alongside Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway in the Oscar-nominated 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada before starring as a former professional psychic who became a California Bureau of Investigation consultant in the hit series The Mentalist for eight seasons until 2015. He has worked on multiple shows and movies since, including a movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara And The Sun directed by Taika Waititi with an expected 2025 release.
Magistrate Kathy Crittenden accepted that Baker was remorseful and was unlikely to drive after drinking again. She released him on a nine-month good behaviour bond with no conviction recorded. Australian judges have discretion to not record a conviction against first-time offenders under exceptional circumstances.
Police reported seeing Baker’s Tesla electric car driving erratically in the fashionable Byron Bay region where he lives at 2.11am on Jul 20.
That was hours after a faulty software update issued by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike created worldwide technological havoc, disrupting airlines, hospitals, government offices and financial systems. Crittenden said the outage knocked police systems offline and an electronic breath test could not be completed on Baker.
She said police resorted to an “old-fashioned sobriety test”.
Police reported Baker was unsteady on his feet and smelled of alcohol. He told police he had consumed four glasses of wine over dinner since 6pm, roughly eight hours prior. He was alone in the car.
Baker was “very polite and cooperative” and “extremely remorseful for his actions”, Crittenden said. Baker had since completed a traffic offenders’ rehabilitation programme, the court was told.
Crittenden said four character references were tendered to the court about Baker’s community contributions, significant remorse and attesting to his conduct being out of character.
“The court has little difficulty in finding that Mr. Baker is remorseful for his offending and it is unlikely he will offend again,” she said.