After getting busted on Manhattan's Lower East Side for buying cocaine and crack a few blocks from her luxury apartment building, former child star Tatum O'Neal explained to police, "I'm researching a part.... I'm doing this for a part." (She later changed her tune, asking the detectives, "Can't we just forget about this?" They couldn't.) Her flimsy excuse is just the latest in a long line of flimsy excuses celebrities have proffered to authorities after being caught red-handed with illegal substances in equally absurd predicaments. A list of our recent favorites follows:

CSI's Gary Dourdan was arrested in April on suspicion of possessing heroin, cocaine, Ecstasy, and every prescription drug under the sun after authorities found him slumped over in his car (parked on the wrong side of the street, no less.) In an e-mail to Access Hollywood, Dourdan later claimed that his friends had just accidentally left the narcotics in his car after he had given them a ride to the Coachella music festival. "Obviously I certainly wish I hadn't been responsible for so many people getting to the festival's VIP area," he wrote. "I am blessed that the Sgt. realized that the luggage carrying whatever they found was not mine and that my tests have been coming back negative." He later pleaded guilty to two counts of coke and Ecstasy possession.

After being arrested on a misdemeanor drunk driving charge back in May, troubled actress Lindsay Lohan was also found to be in possession of a "usable" amount of cocaine. Despite the fact that the drugs were found in the pocket of her pants, Lohan gamely denied being the sniffer. "Yes. I am innocent ... did not do drugs they're not mine," she BlackBerried Access Hollywood's (are you sensing a pattern here?) Billy Bush. She checked into rehab two days later.

Back in October, legitimately insane singer Amy Winehouse and her husband, Blake Civil-Fielder, were arrested in Norway for possession of marijuana. She later claimed she was "duped" by police into signing a confession, despite the fact that translators fluent in English (Winehouse's purported native tongue) handled her case.

After committing a garden variety of traffic infractions near her home in New Jersey, Kimora Lee Simmons, the grating ex-wife of hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, was pulled over by police, who proceeded to find in her Mercedes SL-600 a "small amount of marijuana". Simmons' attorney decried the arrest as "another example of a prominent member of the hip-hop community being made an example of; Russell explained that his wife is "an excellent driver," and that she was a victim of racial profiling. Of course, neither explained the drugs.