Troubled Oscar-winning actress Tatum O’Neal, who has spoken and written about her years-long battle with addiction, was busted last night just blocks from her Lower East Side luxury apartment – charged with buying cocaine and crack, sources said.
Sources told The Post the 44-year-old actress – who became the youngest-ever to snag an Oscar, at age 10, for her role in “Paper Moon” – was arrested at 7:30 p.m. by detectives from Manhattan South Narcotics on Clinton Street between East Broadway and Grand Street.
“When the police approached, she asked them, ‘You know who I am, right?’ ” one source said.
“Then she said, ‘I’m researching a part – I’m doing this for a part as a junkie.’ ”
The source said detectives found a pipe on O’Neal, daughter of actor Ryan O’Neal. The pipe and screen were clean.
“Then she said she’d been clean for two years, and that she’d just came out today,” the source said.
“Can’t we just forget about this?” sources said she begged the detectives.
The suspected drug dealer, Alan Garcia, 33, also was arrested, the sources said. Both were hauled into the 7th Precinct and were expected to spend the night in custody.
O’Neal lives in a building at East Broadway and Canal, The Forward, which used to house the Jewish newspaper of the same name.
“She’s cool – it’s the last thing I thought would happen,” said a security official at her apartment building. “I’m shocked.”
O’Neal, who has three grown kids with tennis bad-boy John McEnroe, wrote in her 2004 memoir “A Paper Life” that boozing and drug-taking was in her DNA.
Her mom, the late actress Joanna Moore, was an alcoholic and hooked on amphetamines even as she was riaising Tatum and her younger brother Griffin in Los Angeles.
“My own young life had eerily echoed Addie’s [her character in ‘Paper Moon’] even though my mother was still alive,” she wrote.
“In the grip of addiction, she had virtually abandoned me and Griffin, leaving us in squalor – as well as beaten and abused by the men in her life.”
Tatum took to the wild life early and hard, though she completed addiction rehab in 1996 and claimed to be clean.
But her acting career was in tatters. Last year, she began a comeback, however, landing film and TV roles, including the alcoholic shrew Maggie, sister of Denis Leary’s firefighter Tommy Gavin, in “Rescue Me.”
In an interview last year, she said she felt sorry for celeb-wreck Britney Spears, saying things started getting better for her when she left LA.
“I was thrust out there as a little kid. It was hard to cope,” she told Post columnist Liz Smith… “I used to walk with my head down. I was involved with drugs and alcohol. I had a lot of shame and self-hatred.”
She was charged early today with criminal possession of a controlled substance; Garcia with criminal sale of a controlled substance.
Additional reporting by Tom Liddy