It was Bai Ling's turbulent love life that led to her preflight arrest.
The 37-year-old actress and scenester exclusively tells E! News that she split with her new boyfriend Wednesday before she was scheduled to fly from LAX to New Mexico to begin shooting a film, turning it into an "emotionally crazy" day for her.
She was dealing with the "huge problem of breaking up [before] Valentine's Day" when she was arrested for shoplifting, Ling said, adding, simply, "Wrong boyfriend."
Just before she was supposed to board an afternoon Southwest flight to Albuquerque, the actress, whose credits include guest roles on Lost and Entourage, was detained by a gift shop employee for trying to walk out of the store without paying for $16 worth of in-flight entertainment—two magazines and two packs of AAA batteries.
She was taken into custody by LAPD and booked on one count of misdemeanor shoplifting at nearby Pacific Station before being released on her own recognizance.
Damon Elliott, a close pal of Ling's, says she was definitely not herself yesterday.
"She was kind of in a mentally unstable state of mind yesterday," he tells E! News. "She had some relationship issues going on. She wasn't in the right frame of mind."
Ling added several prosaic postings to her personal blog later in the afternoon—none mentioned her arrest but all could theoretically be attributed to someone who's nursing a broken heart.
An entry posted at 4:43 p.m.: "Delayed the flight, [wandering] again in the airport like a ghost, why can't I just be the sun smile?" it read. "Life is a sad song sometime but still sings the beauty for their loved ones..."
"She was very spacey and that was pretty much what happened," Elliott said. "She was distracted and had a lot of things going on."
Ling was on her way to Albuquerque to work on Ray director Taylor Hackford's next film, Love Ranch, based on a true story about the Nevada couple who opened the state's first legal brothel. Ling plays one of the working girls.