'Southern Charm' star Thomas Ravenel arrested for assault and battery following sexual misconduct allegations

Reality star Thomas Ravenel’s booking photo (Photo: Charleston County Sheriff’s Office)
Reality star Thomas Ravenel’s booking photo (Photo: Charleston County Sheriff’s Office)

Thomas Ravenel, a star on the Bravo show Southern Charm, was arrested Tuesday in South Carolina on charges of second-degree assault and battery.

The Charleston County Sheriff’s Office booked him four months after officials began investigating an unidentified woman’s allegation that Ravenel sexually assaulted her in January 2015. A former nanny to Ravenel’s young children, “Nanny Dawn” on the show, told People magazine that she was the woman who had reported to Charleston police that Ravenel assaulted her while she was working in his home.

Ravenel, the former state treasurer of South Carolina, has denied the allegations.

A reporter at Charleston’s WCSC TV tweeted within hours that Ravenel was being released and that the judge had ordered him to hand over his passport and remain in South Carolina. He was also ordered to stay away from the alleged victim.

Another woman, Ashley Perkins, had accused Ravenel of having assaulted her mother, Debbie Holloway Perkins, on a date in December 2015, days before the second accusation became public.

The younger Perkins said attorneys for her mother and Ravenel had come to an agreement on a $200,000 payment for her mother’s silence in the matter. (Ravenel’s attorney told the magazine at the time, “My client enjoys a certain degree of fame and unfortunately has become — unfairly — a target for an individual who has, in my opinion, dubious motivations.”)

Thomas Ravenel, center, appears on a December episode of <em>Southern Charm</em> with Ashley Jacobs and Jennifer Snowden. (Photo: Paul Cheney/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)
Thomas Ravenel, center, appears on a December episode of Southern Charm with Ashley Jacobs and Jennifer Snowden. (Photo: Paul Cheney/Bravo/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images)

The nanny, who said she made the report to police, cited Perkins’s allegations as the reason she had spoken with officials.

After the arrest, Bravo confirmed that Ravenel would not return to Southern Charm.

That’s no surprise to fans of the show. Ravenel announced in August that he was leaving, quite unhappily. “I’m not doing the show anymore. In the contract they have the right to fictionalize your story,” he wrote on his now private Twitter account. “They took advantage of me. I decided I’ve got too much to lose and informed them I’m not coming back.”

His attorney, Richard P. Terbrusch, did not immediately respond to Yahoo Entertainment’s request for comment.

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