Actress Jena Malone made citizen’s arrest of dog abuser

It’s exactly the kind of scene you’ve come to expect from Hollywood: crime, violence, punitive justice, and independent darling Jena Malone making a citizen’s arrest. Only this isn’t an action movie starring Jena Malone, it’s literally a local Hollywood news clip, the neighborhood, starring the real person, Jena Malone. On April 5, NBC 4 Los Angeles aired a two-minute segment about a group of strangers who chased and beat up a man they witnessed physically abusing a small, unkempt-looking dog. NBC interviews one of the people who sued the man, and that person is unmistakably hunger games and Pride and Prejudice actress Jena Malone. “I stopped and started chasing him,” she says, “because it’s absolutely not acceptable.” (Malone was not one of the people filmed physically assaulting the man.)

The reporter doesn’t seem to realize who he’s talking to, other than someone who takes “animal rescue” as literally as possible. The men who beat the unidentified assailant say they were “making a citizen’s arrest” and holding him until police arrived. A lawyer tells NBC that legal action can be taken against Citizen’s Arrest officers for continuing to beat the man for a full minute after he had already been subdued. Again, this is also what professional surge protectors do.

On Twitter, Malone gave more context, writing, “I yelled at him to pull over from my car but he didn’t. I got out of my car to try to catch the dog but he started running. […] So I started chasing him. Five men followed her and resumed the manhunt, so Malone returned to her car and came back “to make sure that dog was going to be taken care of”. After an emergency visit to the animal hospital, he was reunited with his real owner (he had been missing for a week) and Malone learned the pup’s name: Champion. She also shared a link to a GoFundMe to cover $5,000 of the survivor’s surgical costs. She spotted the puppy a hundred bones.