Netflix has announced a documentary about Jussie Smollett and his 2019 hate crime hoax.
“The Truth About Jussie Smollett?” will premiere on Aug. 22, and it features interviews with police, lawyers, journalists and investigators who claim to have “new evidence about the case.” According to Netflix’s logline, the 90-minute doc tells the “shocking true story of an allegedly fake story that some now say might just be a true story.”
Smollett was known for playing the starring role of Jamal Lyon on Fox’s music drama “Empire.” In 2019, he reported himself as the victim of a violent hate crime in Chicago, alleging that two men hurled racial slurs at him, poured an unknown chemical substance on him and wrapped a rope around his neck. The incident was first met with an outpouring of public support for Smollett, with celebrities like Viola Davis and Shonda Rhimes expressing outrage about the alleged attack on social media, and political figures like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker describing it as an attempted modern-day lynching.
Soon, however, Chicago police released surveillance images of the supposed perpetrators, identifying the men as Nigerian American brothers who worked as extras on Smollett’s show “Empire.” Evidence that Smollett had orchestrated the attack and paid the brothers $3,500 later surfaced.
Smollett was initially indicted on 16 counts of felony disorderly conduct, but the charges were dropped. A year later, Smollett was re-indicted, and after a high-profile trial in 2021, the actor was convicted on five felony counts of disorderly conduct. He was sentenced to 30 months probation, including 150 days in jail, plus fines totaling more than $120,000. In 2024, the conviction was reversed on procedural grounds, as the Illinois Supreme Court found that the re-prosecution violated due process. In 2025, Smollett settled with the city of Chicago, and he continues to deny that he staged the attack.
“The Truth About Jussie Smollett?” hails from director Gagan Rehill and RAW, the production company behind Netflix hits “Don’t F**k with Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer” and “The Tinder Swindler.” Tom Sheahan and Tim Wardle are the executive producers.
“I’m very excited to be sharing this film with Netflix viewers,” said Rehill in a statement. “This story is a thrilling ride, and we were lucky enough to have access to the key players. I wanted this documentary to balance their competing narratives and to also use their compelling, colorful testimonies to thread the light and shade of the story through the film. But much more than that, I wanted this film to speak to the particular moment of rapid cultural change when this takes place in 2019; when, as a society, we were becoming more combative, more polarized, more divergent over our shared reality – when we began to lack a common singular truth.”