It was shortly after midnight on Tuesday when a Sag Harbor police officer noticed a gray 2025 BMW weave out of a lane and go through a stop sign.
The officer pulled the car over, and when he approached the vehicle on Madison Street, a residential street of the village dotted with modern mansions and 18th-century cottages, the singer and actor Justin Timberlake was behind the wheel.
Mr. Timberlake, 43, had “bloodshot and glassy” eyes and a “strong odor” of alcohol on his breath, and was unsteady on his feet, according to the arrest report filed in Sag Harbor Village Justice Court on Tuesday.
When the officer ordered Mr. Timberlake to go through a series of field sobriety tests, such as walking in a straight line and standing on one leg, the singer “performed poorly,” the report stated.
“I had one martini and followed my friends home,” Mr. Timberlake told the officer, according to the report.
Mr. Timberlake, who is scheduled to perform at Madison Square Garden on June 25 and June 26, was arrested and charged with driving while intoxicated.
He refused to submit to an alcohol test or initial a statement that said his refusal to submit to the test could be used against him at trial, according to the report. He was held overnight before he was taken to Sag Harbor Village Justice Court, where he was arraigned at 9:30 a.m., the police said.
He was released without bail. His publicist and lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
The night he was arrested, Mr. Timberlake had been at the restaurant and bar of the American Hotel on Main Street, said Julian Ramirez, the hotel’s dining director.
The hotel, where guests coming into the lobby are met with a display case filled with cigars and waiters in white aprons, is about half a mile from where the officer reported seeing Mr. Timberlake go through a stop sign. The kitchen closes at 10 p.m., but the bar will sometimes stay open if there is still a crowd at the restaurant, Mr. Ramirez said.
Sag Harbor is part of the Hamptons, a landscape of imposing mansions and lavish oceanfront retreats about 100 miles east of New York City, where there is a long history of arrests involving vehicles and alcohol and featuring high-profile people.
In 2018, Brian France, a former chief executive of NASCAR, was arrested in Sag Harbor on charges of driving while intoxicated and criminal possession of oxycodone after the police said they saw him drive his Lexus through a stop sign.
In 2012, Jason Kidd, then a point guard who had just signed to play with the New York Knicks, hit a Southampton light pole, pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated and wound up on probation, speaking to Long Island high school students about the dangers of drunken driving
Eleven years earlier, Lizzie Grubman, a publicist, backed her Mercedes SUV into a large crowd outside a Hampton nightclub, injuring about 16 people. She was charged with assault, driving while intoxicated and reckless endangerment and served 38 days in jail.
Now comes Mr. Timberlake, who rose to pop stardom in the late 1990s as a teenage member of the boy band ’N Sync, and was once among the most prominent male stars in American music. By 2002, Mr. Timberlake had embarked on a hugely successful solo career, working with cutting-edge pop and R&B producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes.
But his most recent solo album, “Everything I Thought It Was,” was met with criticism and weaker than usual sales when it was released in March, becoming his first solo release to miss No. 1 since “Justified” in 2002.
In recent years, Mr. Timberlake’s behavior toward women in the early 2000s has also come under scrutiny.
The public and media have re-examined his treatment of the singer and actress Britney Spears, whom he dated in the early 2000s, and referenced in songs like “Cry Me a River.” He continued mocking her well after they broke up, making insinuations about her virginity during performances on “Saturday Night Live” and dismissive comments about her music.
He has also acknowledged his failure to defend Janet Jackson, who bore the brunt of the criticism for an infamous Super Bowl halftime performance in 2004, when he tore away part of her costume and revealed her breast.
The mishap, which became known as “the wardrobe malfunction,” came during the performance’s closing duet, which ended with Mr. Timberlake singing “Bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song.” Ms. Jackson was the subject of a severe backlash, while Mr. Timberlake’s career soared.
Mr. Timberlake, who is now married to the actress Jessica Biel, has conceded that he should have taken more responsibility for what happened.
In an Instagram post in 2021, he apologized to both Ms. Jackson and Ms. Spears.
“I am deeply sorry for the times in my life where my actions contributed to the problem, where I spoke out of turn, or did not speak up for what was right,” he wrote in the post, which is no longer available. “I specifically want to apologize to Britney Spears and Janet Jackson.”
But in February 2024, during a performance at Irving Plaza in New York, he appeared to backtrack, when he told the audience that he would “like to take this opportunity to apologize to absolutely nobody,” adding an expletive.
A pair of documentaries in 2022 about Ms. Jackson — one produced by The New York Times and one released on A&E that Ms. Jackson authorized — addressed the Super Bowl performance and its painful aftermath.
In the A&E documentary, Ms. Jackson said that she and Mr. Timberlake remained friends and that she had encouraged him to stay silent after the Super Bowl performance to avoid “drama.”
“He and I have moved on and it’s time for everyone else to do the same,” she said.
But Mr. Timberlake may have trouble eluding the spotlight. Mr. Ramirez, the hotel dining director, said Tuesday that a friend in Portugal had called him to ask about the arrest.
“The whole world is talking about it,” Mr. Ramirez said.
Ben Sisario contributed reporting.
