From 1999 to 2004, the actor Wesley Snipes earned $38 million appearing in more than half a dozen movies, including two sequels to his popular vampire thriller “Blade.”
The taxes he paid in the same period? Zero.
But unlike other celebrities who find themselves on the wrong side of the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Snipes has a flamboyant explanation: he argues that he is not actually required to pay taxes.
Mr. Snipes, who is scheduled to go on trial Monday in Ocala, Fla., has become an unlikely public face for the antitax movement, whose members maintain that Americans are not obligated to pay income taxes and that the government extracts taxes from its citizens illegally.
His trial has become the most prominent income tax prosecution since the 1989 conviction of the billionaire New York hotelier, Leona Helmsley, who went to prison for improperly billing personal expenses to her business.
