Jussie Smollett: Funniest. Trial. Ever.

S pare a thought for Jussie Smollett’s lawyers. Think of them being much like infantrymen who walk through fire on the way to glory, except they’ve been slogging through a mire of bulls*** on their way to absurdity. While wearing flip-flops. Their field commander is an insistently moronic fraud. The Iwo Jima flag they struggle to raise is the reputation of a dim actor who thought he would raise his profile by telling the world that he was attacked by the world’s least likely lynch mob — a duo of black MAGA-heads who just happened to have bleach and a noose on them in case Jussie Smollett should walk by. At two o’clock in the morning. On an exceptionally cold Chicago night. Then walked away after 30 seconds without robbing their victim or doing him more than superficial harm.

The man Dave Chappelle dubbed Juicy Smollé may not have been much of an entertainer when that was his profession — admit it, you’d never heard of him before January 29, 2019, and that’s part of the reason he needed Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Buff to stage a fake beating. (Get a gander at these guys, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo: If they were inclined to beat you up, your injuries would be something other than scratches. Smollett’s face would have looked like Cubist portraiture if they had really attacked him. Ten seconds of actual punching and they’d have Picasso’d this guy.) Yet Smollett should be dubbed American Reality Entertainer of the Year for the hilarity he has brought us all in Chicago for the last week as he has steered his lawyers to argue outright fiction.

The prosecution made a case that was airtight, locked-down, and as seamless as an egg. So what did Team Smollett do? They whined that there should be a mistrial because the judge had “snarled” and “lunged” at them. The judge missed the opportunity to say, “I only snarl when my bushwa detector goes off like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl, and I can’t very well ‘lunge’ when I’m sitting at this desk.” The defense lawyers asked for a directed not-guilty finding, which was so sweet it was like learning an eighth-grader had written to Emily Ratajkowski with an earnest proposal of marriage. Smollett’s publicist, called upon to testify by his side, noted that a celebrity whose earning potential depended on his face would not want to undergo any process that might significantly damage said visage. Just so! cried America. A doctor testified (also for Smollett’s side!) that the injuries were not traumatic.

As for the Smollett pals testifying against him, they produced a $3,500 check Jussie had written them as advance payment, because the ringmaster of this flea circus was too dumb to understand that cash is the preferred payment method when doing stuff you don’t want others to find out about. Smollett’s lawyers’ explanation? That was merely for nutritional tips. The supposed nutritional-advisory siblings said no one had ever paid them more than $100 for such advice before.

Another thing you really ought not to do with co-conspirators who are going to be posing as your attackers is exchange conspiratorial-sounding texts with them, such as the one Smollett sent to Abimbola Osundairo a few days before the attack: “Might need your help on the low?” Prosecutors showed that the Osundairos took a ride-share service and a taxi to the location of the scene of the fake attack but got there early. A surveillance video shows them waiting patiently on a bench for their fellow play-actor to appear. Using Instagram, Smollett advised the brothers that the attack, originally planned for 10 p.m., would have to be put off for a few hours because his flight out of LaGuardia would be delayed. (Right after “only use cash,” in the criminals’ catechism, the next line is, “Never assume a LaGuardia flight will be on time.”)

The defense tried to change the subject to such distractions as the legal weapons found in the Osundairos’ home and Olabinjo Osundairo’s social-media posts, in which he used verboten words such as “fruity” and “Gaylord.” It turns out that both brothers marched in a gay pride parade (in costume, as bare-chested Trojan warriors) and Olabinjo worked at a gay bar. Flinging contradictions in every direction, the defense suggested at different times that Abimbola Osundairo was both a) homophobic and b) a former boyfriend of Smollett. Abimbola hotly denied the accusations, though he offered that he and Smollett used to go to a gay bathhouse together, as chums so often do.

Framing the attack as an episode of homophobia opens up more questions that Smollett can’t answer: If the brothers were looking to attack a random gay person and had an irrepressible 2 a.m. urge to do so, why didn’t they just go to the gay neighborhood where one of them had worked? And why stay up till 2 a.m. on a bitterly cold night hoping a gay black fellow might come strolling along? If they specifically and only hated Smollett, how could they have been so confident that Smollett was going to come walking into their path that they prepared in advance by carrying a noose and filling a hot-sauce bottle with bleach?

And why does surveillance video footage show Smollett picking up the Hans and Franz of the Midwest in his Mercedes Sunday morning, just before the attack late Monday/early Tuesday, and driving by the “attack location” several times? That wasn’t part of any ruse, says Team Jussie. This was actually also an attack. He was attacked twice! He simply forgot to mention the first attack until now and left it to the jury to figure out how “picking guys up in my car” somehow equates with “attack.”

Smollett’s hate-hoax fairy tale about a little red riding hood who just happened to be attacked by two racist wolves while carrying his basket of Subway goodies did expose how gullible Americans can be when you yell “racism.” Cory Booker called it a “vicious attack” and “an attempted modern-day lynching.” Kamala Harris used much the same language, again in declarative terms that indicated no room for doubt. Donald Trump, pretending he had some kind of inside info, said, “I can tell you that it’s horrible. It doesn’t get worse.” In reality, the case looked sketchy from the start as I pointed out a couple of days afterward. The opportunity to leverage the attack for the purposes of appearing sympathetic/understanding/outraged far outweighed any concern with being correct. Everyone who thought he could extract some value from Smollett’s preposterous story just went with it. What’s not to believe in a case like this? As Smollett told ABC’s Robin Roberts in an ill-advised interview, “Listen, if I tell the truth then that’s it, ’cause it’s the truth.’” In other words, I’m not lying because I’m not!