Chicago PD began investigating the report as a \u201cpossible hate crime<\/a>\u201d but failed to find significant photo or video footage of the incident, despite the area having a plethora of surveillance cameras<\/a>. Early skepticism began to emerge online as people questioned Smollett\u2019s recounting of events and cast suspicion upon his initial refusal to submit his cellphone to authorities. (He eventually did submit redacted phone records<\/a>.) Despite the early doubters, Smollett maintained in his first statement after the alleged attack that he had been cooperating with the authorities and remained \u201c100 percent factual and consistent.\u201d<\/a> In a live performance staged the day after his statement, Smollett thanked his supporters before infamously, and inexplicably, stating, \u201cI\u2019m the gay Tupac.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Oh, riiiiight. I do remember that\u2014though I still don\u2019t know what it means.<\/p>\n Neither does anyone else. Still, the skepticism never fully subsided, especially not when the authorities detained two persons of interest: Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo<\/a>, brothers of Nigerian descent. It was soon revealed that Smollett personally knew at least Abimbola, who had been hired for a stint as Smollett\u2019s personal trainer and, along with Olabinjo, had been an extra on Empire. The brothers reportedly told<\/a> investigators that Smollett had paid them to stage the attack after feeling that the threatening letter sent to Fox hadn\u2019t inspired enough alarm<\/a>. Smollett\u2019s lawyers acknowledged that Smollett knew at least one of the brothers via the aforementioned personal training services but denied the trainer\u2019s involvement in a larger statement refuting Smollett\u2019s own involvement overall, stating<\/a>: \u201cIt is impossible to believe that this person could have played a role in the crime against Jussie or would falsely claim Jussie\u2019s complicity.\u201d<\/p>\n On Feb. 20, Smollett was charged by the Cook County State\u2019s Attorney\u2019s Office with a felony disorderly conduct charge in relation to his filing a police report. Meanwhile, CBS News Chicago journalist Charlie De Mar had tracked down surveillance footage of the Osundairo brothers<\/a> buying materials believed to be linked to the alleged assault. The following day, Smollett was officially arrested by Chicago PD, who alleged that the actor had orchestrated his own assault because he was hoping the notoriety would help boost his salary on Empire. The authorities claimed that Smollett had sent the aforementioned threatening letter to himself and that he had paid the Osundairo brothers $3,500<\/a>\u2014in the form of a check made out to Abimbola\u2014to orchestrate the attack. (The check was reportedly labeled as being for a \u201cfive-week nutrition\/workout\u201d program in preparation for an upcoming music video Smollett was planning to shoot called \u201cDon\u2019t Go.\u201d) On March 8, a grand jury indicted Smollett on 16 counts of disorderly conduct<\/a>. Smollett pleaded not guilty<\/a>. In a surprising turn that angered both the mayor and police department, on March 26, the prosecutors dropped all charges<\/a>, not because they found Smollett innocent, but because Smollett had reached a deal to forfeit a $10,000 bond payment and perform some community service in exchange.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Chris Molanphy <\/a><\/p>\n You said the prosecutors dropped the charges, but didn\u2019t Smollett serve time?<\/p>\n A full six days of it! But before we get to that, we need to talk about the civil suit. Following the dropping of the charges, Chicago police ordered Smollett to pay $130,000<\/a> to cover the cost of the police investigation (including overtime) into his report, but the actor refused. On April 12, 2019, the city of Chicago filed a civil suit against Smollett<\/a>, which was met by Smollett with a countersuit. The civil suit was settled<\/a> in May of this year, six years after the legal battle started, with Smollett agreeing to make a $50,000 donation to a Chicago-based nonprofit. (Separately but surely pointedly, Smollett also promised to make an additional $10,000 donation to the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which aids victims of abuse at the hands of Chicago law enforcement.)<\/p>\n In June 2019, the Chicago PD released the bodycam footage of the initial officers responding to the call. In it, Smollett is shown with the makeshift noose still around his neck, telling the officers that he kept it on because he wanted them \u201cto see it.\u201d This struck some following the case as an odd and unlikely choice for a Black man who has just been attacked, and would become a sticking point for Smollett\u2019s disbelievers. In August 2019, a special prosecutor was assigned to independently investigate, at the behest of a Cook County Circuit Court judge, the initial charges against Smollett and the prosecutors\u2019 eventual decision to drop those charges. After more than a full year of investigating, on Feb. 12, 2020, Smollett was eventually indicted again by a grand jury, this time with six counts of disorderly conduct<\/a> for allegedly lying to the police. The special prosecutor claimed that \u201csufficient factual evidence\u201d<\/a> was found supporting the notion that the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s office was wrong for dropping the charges. Smollett once again pleaded not guilty. The trial began over a year later in November 2021, and on Dec. 9, 2021, the jury found Smollett guilty<\/a> of five of the six counts. Smollett was sentenced to 150 days of jail time, 30 months of probation<\/a>, and ordered to pay $145,000 in a combination of fines and restitution to the Chicago PD<\/a>. However, the actor only ended up serving six days<\/a> of his sentence after his legal team launched an appeal. Notably, Smollett maintained his innocence throughout the entire ordeal.<\/p>\n Still, on Nov. 21, 2024, the Illinois Supreme Court overturned Smollett\u2019s conviction.<\/p>\n Wait, what?! What does that mean?<\/p>\n It is common for convictions to get overturned because of legalities, not necessarily because of a change in evidence or the jury\u2019s verdict. Smollett\u2019s lawyers worked on an appeal for years, arguing that their client shouldn\u2019t have been charged again after the state\u2019s attorney\u2019s office dropped its charges in exchange for community service and a bond. Illinois judges agreed that, even if the special prosecutor decided that the prosecutors shouldn\u2019t have dropped the charges, it doesn\u2019t change the fact that they did drop those charges, making it unfair for the court<\/a> to not honor that earlier agreement to resolve the matter without jail time.<\/p>\n I feel caught up now, for better or for worse. Regardless, let\u2019s move on to the new information in the Netflix documentary. I\u2019m assuming it makes some sort of argument to exonerate Smollett?\u00a0<\/p>\n Yes and no. The Truth About Jussie Smollett? presents two schools of thought when it comes to the actor. The documentary, directed by Gagan Rehill (best known for the Netflix doc Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal), begins primarily with talking-head interviews from two people formerly involved with the case: Melissa Staples, the former chief of detectives for the Chicago police, and Eddie Johnson, former superintendent of the Chicago police. Johnson casts doubt upon Smollett\u2019s story with questions we\u2019re already familiar with, like, for example, why would Smollett keep a noose around his neck? Or, why was Smollett so reluctant to hand over his phone? Additionally, if Smollett had been walking home from a Subway restaurant when he was allegedly attacked, then why was the Subway bag in his hand still in \u201cpristine condition\u201d? Furthermore, Staples walks the audience through the various methods that detectives used to firmly place the Osundairo brothers at the scene, from tracking down surveillance footage to subpoenaing taxi and ride-share records. Johnson brings up Smollett\u2019s bombshell Good Morning America interview shortly after the purported attack, during which Smollett stated that the two figures caught on the surveillance cameras were definitely, without a doubt, his attackers. However, Smollett also maintained that the Osundairo brothers had nothing to do with it. The police\u2019s stance is that those two figures were undoubtedly the Osundairo brothers. Johnson says that Smollett \u201cinadvertently identified two guys to the whole country.\u201d<\/p>\n The Osundairo brothers are also present in the doc to tell their side of the story, claiming that Smollett asked them to beat him up, with the end goal of posting the surveillance footage caught by his building\u2019s security to social media.<\/p>\n And what\u2019s the evidence presented that suggests Smollett might have been telling the truth?\u00a0<\/p>\n Smollett counters some of the classic points of skepticism early on in the documentary. He alleges that he wasn\u2019t sitting around with the rope around his neck, but that he had \u201cput it back on because we wanted to show them what was happening.\u201d Smollett also acknowledges that he didn\u2019t want to hand over his phone to the police not only because of the sensitive information on it related to other notable figures, but also because \u201cthe large thing\u201d that he didn\u2019t want disclosed was his \u201cdrug use.\u201d \u201cI had to explain every single eccentricity of mine,\u201d Smollett explains in the doc. \u201cIt was like playing whack-a-mole with rumors, with lies \u2026 but at a certain point it\u2019s just too many\u201d and \u201cyou can\u2019t catch them all.\u201d Smollett explains that he was making \u201cgreat money,\u201d and wasn\u2019t dissatisfied with his pay (which is the police\u2019s assumed motive). He further clarifies a text he sent to Abimbola, in which he wrote, \u201cMay need your help on the low,\u201d by stating that he was referring to \u201can herbal steroid that was illegal here in the U.S. that could be gotten in Nigeria\u201d and is used to \u201close belly fat.\u201d<\/p>\n The biggest focus of the documentary involves two more witnesses who corroborate Smollett\u2019s side of the story: Anthony Moore, a security guard who was working at a nearby Sheraton hotel that evening, and Rebecca Bell, a neighbor of Smollett\u2019s who was walking her dogs just over an hour before the attack was supposed to have taken place. Both Moore and Bell state that they saw white men in the area that evening. Bell explains that she saw a white man in the neighborhood with what looked to be \u201ca little bit of rope\u201d sticking out the back of his jacket around 12:45 a.m. Moore, who says he flashed his light in the face of one of the assailants near the time of the alleged attack, claims that, though the man was wearing a ski mask, he was clearly a white male. The security guard also notes that the police investigating the case only ever showed him a lineup of exclusively Black men.<\/p>\n Two figures feature heavily in the last third of the documentary, presenting potential evidence that they believe exonerates Smollett: Abigail Carr, a documentary producer, and Chelli Stanley, a freelance journalist. (Both are listed in this film\u2019s credits as consultants.) Carr and Stanley cast enormous doubt upon the Chicago Police Department. Carr states that she did her own investigating and found that \u201cthere was no hard proof connecting the Osundairo brothers to the crime,\u201d from eyewitnesses to forensics. For her part, Stanley says she looked into the law enforcement team handling the case and found that the 38 detectives and supervisors assigned to the case had \u201ca combined 563 misconduct allegations formerly filed against them by the citizens of Chicago, ranging from criminal sexual misconduct to shooting people and selling drugs.\u201d She also states that \u201cone of the first people that showed up on the scene was accused in a formal complaint of homophobic hate speech against a Black man,\u201d though it\u2019s worth noting that Smollett has never mentioned any wrongdoing on the responding officers\u2019 parts when they answered the call. Carr also casts doubt upon Johnson\u2019s integrity by revealing that he was later fired for misconduct for lying and saying he was having a medical episode after officers found him asleep at the wheel in a parked police vehicle, when footage actually showed he had been drinking for a few hours beforehand.<\/p>\n Additionally, the documentary frames the saga within Chicago\u2019s poor history with, as Stanley puts it, \u201ctampering with\u201d and \u201chiding\u201d evidence. The doc uses the case of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old boy whose murder at the hands of a Chicago police officer in 2014 was misrepresented as justified by law enforcement until video of the shooting, released to the public, disproved the preliminary internal police reports. Though the murder happened in 2014, it remained a hot-button issue nationally and within Chicago, pointing at a growing mistrust of local law enforcement at the time of Smollett\u2019s incident. (The implicated officer in the McDonald case was sentenced in January 2019.) The documentary posits, via various talking-head interviews from journalists, that the Chicago Police Department, under a mountain of scrutiny at the time due to the McDonald case, \u201cwanted a win.\u201d<\/p>\n While that may be culturally significant in terms of the climate at the time, it does feel a little weird that they use McDonald\u2019s murder so heavily within this documentary about a celebrity who was found guilty by a jury of his peers for staging a fake hate crime. Do they present any other evidence?\u00a0<\/p>\n Stanley and Carr discuss two further pieces of evidence that they believe prove Smollett was telling the truth. The first is a segment of surveillance footage, which appears to be visually brighter than the rest of the footage shown, and which Carr and Stanley claim shows white men at the scene. The second is a video of a conversation between Gloria Rodriguez, the Osundairos\u2019 lawyer, and Olabinjo. In that conversation, Rodriguez is explaining to Olabinjo\u2014who was already a convicted felon and was potentially in some hot water when firearms were discovered at his home during the raid\u2014the difference between an expunged record and a sealed record, specifically telling him, an aspiring actor, that directors, agents, and the like can\u2019t find sealed records. To Carr and Stanley, this conversation is proof that the Osundairos hammered out a deal with law enforcement to claim they were at the scene. However, Rodriguez states that Olabinjo\u2019s record is neither expunged nor sealed, and explains that the police don\u2019t have the authority to seal somebody\u2019s record, making the assertion, in her words, \u201cridiculous.\u201d<\/p>\n The documentary ends with Smollett maintaining that he didn\u2019t fabricate a hate crime hoax. And, to cast further doubt, the production team shows the lighter-toned surveillance footage to some of the interviewees and asks them to describe what they see. Both Staples and Johnson say they see an unmasked Black man, both Carr and Stanley say they see a white man, Rodriguez says that she also sees a white man, and Moore says that he sees a Black man.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Ellin Stein <\/a><\/p>\n \u2026 I still have so many questions.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n South Park\u2019s New Episode Rises to New Heights of Depravity. It\u2019s a Much-Needed Reality Check. <\/p>\n Everyone Thought They Knew the Amanda Knox Story in 2007. But a New Show Proves We Had No Idea. <\/p>\n I Went to the Epicenter of Male Vulnerability. Its Location May Surprise You.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/b4b13078-0768-4dfd-a221-2b90efb7adf4.jpeg\")
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