10th December, 2021
A Chicago jury has found actor and singer Jussie Smollett guilty of faking to the police a racist and homophobic attack in 2019.
The 39 year-old actor was convicted nearly three years after he claimed two Trump-loving bigots beat him up, tied a noose around his neck and doused him in bleach in a misbegotten bid to raise his public profile.
The actor, who faced six counts in his case, was found guilty of the first five counts, including disorderly conduct, and acquitted of the last count.
For Smollett, the verdict is the final chapter in the made-for-tv saga that jurors found Smollett not just starred in, but directed from start to finish when he asked two men to “fake beat him up,” gave them a script of homophobic and racist slurs to deliver and selected a stage for the phoney beatdown that he thought was in direct view of surveillance cameras.
The jurors deliberated for over nine hours before reaching the verdict.
They heard six days of testimony from 13 witnesses.
In the absence of smoking gun evidence, the trial in Chicago criminal court came down to whose story was more believable: Smollett’s, or Nigerian brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo.
The defense vehemently maintained Smollett was the victim of a real hate crime and called the brothers “sophisticated liars and criminals,” who later offered to recant their story and “tell the truth” in exchange for $2 million.
“He’s dumb enough to go into Obama’s city and pretend there’s Trump supporters running around with MAGA hats? Give me a break,” defense attorney Nenye Uche told jurors in his closing arguments.
“The brothers were like wolves disguised as sheep in the hen house.”
Prosecutors, however, said Smollett exploited tense race relations for his own gain and paid the Osundairos $3,500 to stage the attack so he could get attention.
“It’s clearly a violation of the law to go to the police and report to police a fake crime and tell police it’s a real crime,” special prosecutor Dan Webb told the jury.
The two brothers, who’d known the former “Empire” actor for about a year and a half prior to the alleged hoax, both delivered hours-long testimonies as the prosecution’s star witnesses.
Abimbola, 28, told jurors that he and Smollett met at a club in the fall of 2017 and soon became so close, he considered the actor to be a “brother.”
So when Smollett texted him on January 25, 2019 asking him for some “help on the low,” he agreed to meet up with the actor, who brought up a piece of hate mail he received that showed a stick figure hanging and the words “You will die black f-g.”
“He talked about how the studio was not taking the mail seriously, the hate mail he’d received earlier,” Abimbola testified.
“I was confused, I looked puzzled and then he explained that he wanted me to fake beat him up.”
Abimbola, who is now an amateur boxer, claimed Smollett told him specific lines he wanted the brothers to deliver — “‘Empire’, f—-t, n—-r, MAGA” — and then gave blow-by-blow instructions.