Rap music mogul Marion “Suge” Knight was arrested on charges of assault and domestic violence on Wednesday after punching his girlfriend and pulling a knife on her during an argument, Las Vegas police said.

Knight, 43, co-founder of the rap label Death Row Records, also was charged with two drug offenses when he was found to be in possession of ecstasy and the prescription narcotic Hydrocodone, police said in a statement.

Police said Knight’s girlfriend of three years, who was not identified in the statement, told officers that Knight punched her in the head during an argument while he was driving with her in an automobile.

In an effort to escape, the girlfriend grabbed the steering wheel causing the vehicle to hit a curb and come to an abrupt stop, then she fled with Knight in pursuit, police said.

When officers arrived on the scene, responding to a domestic violence call, they found Knight standing over the woman holding a knife, according to police.

He was arrested without incident and booked into the Clark County Detention Center, while his girlfriend was taken to a nearby hospital, police said.

Knight, who helped promote such rap stars as Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur in the 1990s, has seen his career as a record executive overshadowed by numerous run-ins with the law over the years.

He was sent to prison in October 1996 for violating his probation on a previous assault case by kicking a man during a scuffle at a Las Vegas hotel.

American lawyers are rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of a massive lawsuit following the revelation on Wednesday that the Los Angeles Times was the victim of a hoax when it reported that the rap mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs was behind a gun attack on another rapper, Tupac Shakur, in 1994.

The Times reported last week that the attack on Shakur at the Quad recording studios in Manhattan, when he was pistol-whipped and shot three times, was carried out by associates of Diddy and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand.

The newspaper’s report, written by Chuck Philips, was based on FBI reports filed with a federal court in Miami. But the documents have been exposed by The Smoking Gun (TSG) website as fakes, put together by an imprisoned con man, James Sabatino, who is an accomplished document forger.

Sabatino, 31, is a fantasist, says TSG, who has long tried to insinuate himself into important events in hip-hop history, including the shooting of Shakur and the murder in 1997 of another rap star, the Notorious B.I.G.

In his fantasy world, Sabatino has ‘managed’ hip-hop stars and conducted business with Combs, Shakur and others. In fact, says TSG, he is “little more than a rap devotee, a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida” currently doing time for fraud.

The purported FBI reports were filed by Sabatino in connection with a lawsuit against Combs in which he claimed he was never paid for rap recordings in which he said he was involved (another fantasy).

How did Chuck Philips, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who spent six months compiling his report, fall for Sabatino’s hoax? He says he believed in the authenticity of the documents in part because they had been filed in court. But TSG claims the Times overlooked numerous misspellings and unusual acronyms that should have cast doubt on the documents’ authenticity.

Also, the documents appeared to have been prepared on a typewriter. A former FBI supervisor told TSG that the bureau ceased using typewriters about 30 years ago. TSG also discovered that the documents could not be found in an FBI database.

The LA Times has apologised to readers and is to launch an internal review.