The Cook County investigation into district attorney Kim Foxx’s handling of the Jussie Smollett case found that she committed “substantial abuses of discretion and failures” in the course of investigating and prosecuting the hoax hate crime.
Released Monday by Cook County Circuit Court Judge Michael Toomin, the report found that Foxx’s office “breached its obligations of honesty and transparency by making false and misleading statements.”
Smollett was found guilty of five of six counts of disorderly conduct for falsely reporting to police that he’d been subjected to a violent, racially motivated, and homophobic attack. The Empire actor will be sentenced by a judge in January and faces as many as three years in prison.
The retired judge was appointed to investigate Foxx’s handling of the case when she suddenly dropped all charges in late March after the actor was indicted by a grand jury for allegedly orchestrating a hate crime against himself to advance his career. At the time, Foxx pointed to Smollett’s record of community service and the victimless nature of his alleged crime as justification for dismissing the case.
The judge subpoenaed Foxx, her top deputy Joseph Magats, and Smollett himself in April 2019 to appear in court to testify to the hoax Smollett staged and to illuminate some of the “irregularities” in Foxx’s treatment of the case.
The state later appointed a special prosecutor to probe Foxx’s decision after text messages revealed that Foxx was commenting on the case with her deputy after she was no longer involved in the investigation. She had formally recused herself from it due to circulating allegations that she had a personal conflict of interest with the Smollett family. Later, Foxx tried to clarify that she had not recused herself “in the legal sense.”
But the report takes issue with Foxx’s reasoning in dropping charges against Smollett, mentioning the new evidence that was introduced that made pursuing the case more urgent.
Foxx and aides also falsely said Smollett could be penalized with a $10,000 fine, the cash bail amount he agreed to forfeit as part of the original charges filed against him. However, this number was inaccurate, the report said, as Smollett ultimately could be liable for paying $300,000 to reimburse the Chicago Police Department for the cost of investigating his claim that he was the victim of a racially motivated physical assault while walking near his hotel in the middle of the night.
The report also showed that Foxx often communicated via phone calls and text with Jurnee Smollett, Jussie Smollett’s sister, for at least five days after Foxx was informed that the Chicago Police Department had launched an probe into the actor for making a false report.
In her reelection video for Cook County State Attorney in November 2019, Foxx admitted that she mismanaged the prosecution of Smollett and took responsibility for it.
“The truth is, I didn’t handle it well,” Foxx says in the video. “I own that. I’m making changes in my office to make sure we do better. That’s what reform is about.”