Prosecutors: Jussie Smollett Faked Attack After Real Threat Was Ignored
During opening arguments in the actor’s trial, the prosecution said Mr. Smollett staged a hate crime because his workplace did not take a death threat seriously enough.The actor Jussie Smollett made himself the victim of a staged hate crime in 2019 to draw the attention of his colleagues on the television show “Empire” after he decided they had failed to take an earlier written threat seriously, a prosecutor said in a Chicago court on Monday. Dan K. Webb, the special prosecutor, laid out what he saw as Mr. Smollett’s motive in opening arguments of the actor’s trial on criminal charges that he lied to the police when he reported he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack.In January 2019, Mr. Webb said, Mr. Smollett received an anonymous “actual hate letter,” which included a homophobic slur and a drawing of a stick figure hanging from a tree. The letter included the acronym “MAGA” made of cutout newspaper and magazine letters, he said, a reference to former President Donald J. Trump’s campaign slogan. Law enforcement has not been able to determine who sent the letter, Mr. Webb said.“Therefore, he devised this fake hate crime to take place so that the ‘Empire’ studio would take this more seriously,” he said of Mr. Smollett, “because this fake hate crime would get media attention.”Nearly three years ago, when Mr. Smollett reported that he had been assaulted, he was primarily known for “Empire,” a drama in which he played a son vying for control of his father’s music empire. He later lost that role after being indicted on charges that he had lied to the police, who concluded that he had paid two brothers to stage the attack. After a drawn-out and tumultuous legal process, the trial began at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Chicago with the selection of 12 jurors and three alternates. Mr. Smollett arrived at the courthouse Monday morning, clutching the arm of his mother, Janet Smollett, and sat with several family members as the opening arguments began.Mr. Smollett is standing trial on six counts of felony disorderly conduct associated with the reports he had made to the police. The grand-jury indictment asserts he had “no reasonable ground for believing that such an offense had been committed.”When his account of being attacked on a late-night run to pick up a tuna sandwich became public it struck a chord in a politically divided nation confronting the persistent threat of racism. The actor told the police his attackers poured bleach on him, placed a rope around his neck and yelled, “This is MAGA country.”Lawmakers, activists and celebrities reacted furiously to the incident, but the dialogue shifted abruptly in February 2019, when the police told the public that Mr. Smollett had paid two men $3,500 to stage the attack. The police said they had a copy of the check as well as phone records showing that Mr. Smollett spoke to the brothers before and after the alleged attack took place.Comedians used the story as a punchline. Mr. Trump said it was a smear on his supporters, while liberal politicians condemned it as a disservice to victims of hate crimes.“I’m sad, frustrated and disappointed,” Vice President Kamala Harris, who was a senator and presidential candidate at the time, wrote on Twitter. “When anyone makes false claims to police, it not only diverts resources away from serious investigations but it makes it more difficult for other victims of crime to come forward.”But Mr. Smollett has maintained his innocence, pleading not guilty to the charges and insisting the attack happened just as he described.“They won’t let this go,” Mr. Smollett said in an Instagram interview last year. “There is an example being made, and the sad part is that there’s an example being made of someone that did not do what they’re being accused of.”Initially, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office dropped the felony charges against the actor, saying that Mr. Smollett had forfeited his $10,000 bond and explaining that he was not a threat to public safety and had a record of service to the community. Chicago’s police superintendent at the time, Eddie Johnson, and its mayor, Rahm Emanuel, suggested Mr. Smollett was getting special treatment because of his celebrity status.Kim Foxx, Chicago’s top prosecutor, stood by the decision.“Yes, falsely reporting a hate crime makes me angry, and anyone who does that deserves the community’s outrage,” Ms. Foxx wrote in a Chicago Tribune op-ed after her office dropped the charges. “But, as I’ve said since before I was elected, we must separate the people at whom we are angry from the people of whom we are afraid.”In the months that followed, much of the discussion surrounding the case focused on how prosecutors had handled it.Ms. Foxx had recused herself from overseeing the case to avoid any perception that she had a conflict of interest after disclosing that she had communicated with Mr. Smollett’s representatives when he was still considered a victim. She delegated it to a deputy, but text messages later showed that Ms. Foxx had remained closely engaged with the case, expressing concern to a colleague that the office was treating the actor too harshly.Later in 2019, a judge appointed Mr. Webb as a special prosecutor to review whether Mr. Smollett should be recharged and to assess whether there had been any misconduct in the way the case was managed by the state’s attorney’s office.Mr. Webb renewed charges against Mr. Smollett in February 2020. He later determined that the state’s attorney’s office had not violated the law, but did abuse its discretion in deciding to drop charges and put out false or misleading public statements about why it did so.Understand the Jussie Smollett TrialCard 1 of 5A staged hate crime? More
