Jussie Smollett Found Guilty of Staging Hoax Hate Crime

Chicago, Ill. — Former Empire star Jussie Smollett is guilty of staging a hoax hate crime against himself and then falsely reporting it to police, a jury ruled Thursday, nearly three years after the phony racist and anti-gay attack was carried out early on a frigid January morning.

Smollett was found guilty on five of the six counts of felony disorderly conduct, low-level charges, each tied to making a false report to police. The Empire actor showed no emotion as the verdict was read, standing motionless with an attorney’s hand on his shoulder.

A sentencing hearing is expected to be scheduled in January. Smollett will remain free on bond. He could face up to three years in prison but could also be released on probation. The severity of the sentence will in part depend on whether Judge James Linn determines that Smollett perjured himself during his testimony, as the prosecution alleged.

The jury deliberated for over nine hours combined Wednesday afternoon and Thursday. The jury comprised seven men, one of whom is black, and five women, all of whom are white. There have been neither protests nor gatherings of Smollett’s supporters outside the George N. Leighton Criminal Court Building in Chicago throughout the trial.

Speaking to reporters after the hearing, special prosecutor Dan Webb said the guilty verdict was a “resounding message by the jury that in fact Mr. Smollett did exactly what we said he did.” He called the verdict “complete vindication” for Chicago police, who were accused by Smollett’s defense of making a rush to judgement in the case.

“The work they did was extraordinary,” Webb said of the two dozen police officers and detectives who worked on the investigation.

Webb expressed particular scorn for Smollett lying to the jury for “hours and hours and hours,” spinning a “completely ridiculous story.” When asked by National Review about potential perjury charges, Webb said that typically follow-up perjury charges don’t occur if the defendant is convicted.

“I think this will probably be a point I make at sentencing, that not only did Mr. Smollett lie to the police and wreak havoc here in this city for weeks on end for no reason whatsoever, but then he compounded the problem by lying under oath to a jury,” Webb said.

Smollett’s lead attorney, Nenye Uche, said after the hearing that the actor and his legal team were “very disappointed,” and they “respectfully disagree with the jury’s verdict.”

“Just because a jury gives a verdict doesn’t mean it’s the right one,” Uche said.

The defense had an uphill battle, he said, because for three years Smollett has been “tried and convicted in the media.” He said they’re confident they will win on appeal.

“We are confident in our appellate system, we are confident in our Illinois Supreme Court, and we’re confident that at the end of the day what’s out there in the news media and in the gossip forums are not going to stand a chance in court,” Uche said.

Uche said the verdict was “inconsistent” because the jury found Smollett guilty of lying to detectives five times the day of the attack, but then found him not guilty on one count that involved lying again to police in a follow-up interview about two weeks later.

Uche called the proceedings in court “very unusual” and an “emotional rollercoaster.” He said he would “plead the Fifth” when asked by National Review if he thought his team received a fair hearing in front of Cook County Judge James Linn.

“We will be here for ten hours if I start listing the grounds of appeal,” Uche said.

Smollett did not comment as he left the courthouse  swarmed by reporters and photographers.

The jury’s ruling marks the end of one of the most bizarre national criminal cases in recent years. Smollett, who is black and openly gay, claimed that two attackers — at least one of them white — jumped him out of the blue around 2 a.m. on January 29, 2019, used racist and homophobic slurs, doused him with bleach, hung a noose around his neck, and yelled “this is MAGA country,” a reference to then-president Donald Trump’s slogan.

It seemed horrible, and Chicago police spent more than 3,000 hours trying to solve the crime. But by mid-February, investigators had determined the hate attack was a hoax. Smollett, they believed, had conspired with two brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, black extras on Empire, to stage the attack in a perverse kind of street theater.

The case was injected with politics from the very beginning.

To many on the left, it was just more proof of how hateful and bigoted Trump’s America had become. Headlines blared that Smollett had been “brutally attacked.” New Jersey senator Cory Booker denounced the “vicious attack” on Twitter as a “modern-day lynching,” an allegation echoed by then-senator Kamala Harris. Joe Biden tweeted at the time, “What happened today to Jussie Smollett must never be tolerated in this country,” and “We are with you Jussie.” During an interview on Good Morning America, Smollett said he believed his attackers may have been motivated by his outspoken criticism of Trump. “I come really, really hard against his administration,” Smollett told Robin Roberts. “And I don’t hold my tongue.”

For his part, Trump weighed in when he was asked about the attack, calling it “horrible.”

But there were red flags from the start, for anyone willing to look.

For one, why would two men be walking around downtown Chicago in subzero temperatures at two in the morning with a noose and a hot-sauce bottle filled with bleach on the off chance they would stumble upon a gay black celebrity? And why would anyone declare Chicago — where Hillary Clinton won almost 74 percent of the vote in 2016 — MAGA country?

In mid February, investigators learned that the attack wasn’t random at all. On February 13, 2019, police arrested the Osundairo brothers when they returned to the U.S. from a trip to Nigeria. At the advice of an attorney, the brothers decided to cooperate with authorities and exposed Smollett’s plan.  Investigators believed them, because their story matched up with the surveillance footage and other evidence. “I couldn’t find anything false,” Michael Theis, the lead detective, said of the brothers’ accounts in devastating and detailed testimony last week.

Once viewed by many as a victim, Smollett became the subject of national scorn. He was fired from his $100,000-per-episode Empire gig and testified that he hasn’t been able to find new acting work since. “I’ve lost my livelihood,” Smollett told jurors on Monday.

Instead of being famous for acting and singing, Smollett was suddenly most famous for trying to cash in on being black and gay by casting himself as the victim of a horrific hate crime. He became a punch line, mocked on Saturday Night Live, and the focus of Dave Chappelle’s jokes.

The jury’s guilty verdict will likely make it even harder for Smollett to revive his derailed career and to restore his reputation. Smollett has steadfastly maintained his innocence.

From the beginning of the trial last Monday, Webb’s team put on a strong case, offering the jury a thorough and detailed walk through the evidence.

“He developed a secret plan that would make it appear that there was actually a hate crime that occurred against him by supporters of Donald Trump,” Webb said of Smollett during his opening statement.

By contrast, Smollett’s defense team often seemed flailing and unfocused, grasping at any straw to give the jury a reason to doubt the prosecution’s version of events. In some cases, the defense offered seemingly contradictory theories. For example, they simultaneously suggested the Osundairo brothers were motivated by raging homophobia to attack Smollett, and that Abimbola Osundairo also was once Smollett’s lover. Sometimes the defense seemed to acknowledge that the Osundairos attacked Smollett, but they also suggested one attacker may have been white. Maybe there was a third attacker. Maybe it was all about money.

Uche told the jury during his closing argument on Wednesday that he didn’t have all the answers. “This case is so bizarre,” he said.

To many, a guilty verdict may have seemed all but assured considering the evidence prosecutors had against Smollett — security footage of him driving past the attack site several times just two days earlier with the two actor brothers, a text message to one of those brothers asking him to meet “on the low,” a $3,500 check Smollett wrote to one of the brothers, an apparent payment for the performance, and records indicating Smollett had been in regular contact with one of his brothers in the hours before it occurred.

Prosecutors said there was no way the Osundairos could have expected to encounter Smollett outside his apartment at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday in subzero temperatures if the attack wasn’t preplanned. And if Smollett really wanted police to solve the crime, he would have turned over his phone, medical records, and DNA sample, as investigators asked. Smollett said he wanted to help police solve the crime, but “I cared more about my privacy.”

But the guilty verdict was never guaranteed, especially once Smollett decided to take the witness stand on Monday. Smollett appeared composed, confident, and polite, and he told a story that seemed to offer at least some explanation for the evidence against him.

Yes, he testified, he did drive with the Osundairo brothers past the scene of the crime just two days before it occurred, but it wasn’t a dry run for the attack, as prosecutors alleged. Rather, they were driving around smoking weed, something he did often, both alone and with others.

Yes, he’d paid Abimbola Osundairo $3,500 on that same day, but it was payment to Osundairo for providing him with a nutrition and exercise plan so Smollett could look good for an upcoming music video shoot, not a pre-payment for a hoax attack.

And yes, Smollett had called Abimbola Osundairo at least twice in the hours before the attack and sent him several direct Instagram messages, but that was because his flight from New York to Chicago was delayed, so he needed to reschedule their workout until 9 a.m. the next day. He denied that he was communicating with Osundairo to coordinate the attack.

During his closing argument, Webb accused Smollett of repeatedly lying to the jury, and he said the actor tailored his testimony around the indisputable evidence in the case.

“Mr. Smollett went on that witness stand, took an oath that he was going to tell the truth, and he made many false statements to you,” Webb told the jury. “His testimony at the end of the day lacks any sort of credibility whatsoever.”

During the trial, prosecutors argued that Smollett’s motive for the attack stemmed from a hateful letter he received at the Empire studio about a week before the fake attack. Smollett, they argued, didn’t believe the studio leaders were taking the letter seriously enough, and staging the attack would prove a point. Prosecutors appear to have dropped a previously alleged motive that Smollett staged the attack to raise his public profile and to get a raise. Former Chicago police superintendent Eddie T. Johnson previously alleged that Smollett staged the fake hate crime to “promote his career.”

Smollett testified that he had no complaints with his pay on Empire. “I was happy with my entire contract,” he said. And rather than being upset that studio leaders weren’t taking the hate mail seriously, Smollett said the security he got from the studio was too intrusive.

Uche said Smollett actually had “anti-motive” for the attack — he had a historic gay wedding scene to shoot for Empire in early February, and an important music video to shoot. “He could not afford anything to happen to his face,” Uche said of Smollett.

Webb was appointed special prosecutor to take a new look at the case in August 2019, after Cook County state attorney Kim Foxx’s office dropped all the charges against Smollett. Foxx’s office believed a brief term of community service and the forfeit of $10,000 bond was a fair punishment for Smollett’s crime.

Webb said he agreed to take the case as a special prosecutor because he believed it was important to bring it to a jury. He said it was clearly the right decision to re-indict Smollett and to take him to trial.

“Whether we won or lost at trial was not the issue,” Webb said, adding, “The true facts, I thought, needed to come out, and we did it.”

Webb said his office worked pro-bono on the case, calling it “the right thing to do.” He declined to answer a question about whether he believed the jury’s verdict was an indictment of Foxx’s office.

“What happened speaks for itself.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with comments from special prosecutor Dan Webb and Jussie Smollett’s lead defense attorney Nenye Uche.