On Thursday, Jussie Smollett was found guilty of staging a hoax hate crime almost three years after he claimed two Trump supporters attacked, beat him up, tied a noose around his neck, and dumped him in bleach in an ill-conceived bid to raise his public profile.
The disgraced former Empire actor was convicted by twelve jurors in Chicago criminal court of six counts of felony disorderly conduct for lying to Chicago police following testimony from 13 witnesses and over nine hours of deliberation.
The 39-year-old actor stood huddled with his attorneys and kept his eyes trained on the panelists as the jurors read out the verdict. Smollett remained stoic as a phalanx of family members, who watched the eight-day trial from the gallery’s front row, sat frozen.
It took Smollett over an hour to return to the courthouse to hear the jury’s verdict. The actor is now facing up to three years in prison. After the conviction, Smollett was later seen hugging his siblings, some of whom didn’t stand for the jury before the panelists left the courtroom.
Nenye Uche, Smollett’s lead defense attorney, said the actor plans to fight the conviction on appeal following the verdict.
Uche told reporters that “Smollett is committed to clearing his name, and he’s one hundred percent confident that he’s going to get cleared by the appellate court. Unfortunately, that’s not the route we wanted but sometimes that’s the route that you have to take to win, especially a case where we remain one hundred percent confident in our client’s innocence.”
The conviction is the final episode in the made-for-TV series that jurors found Smollett not just starred in, but directed from start to finish when he hired two men to act as his attackers, gave them a script of homophobic and racist slurs to yell, and picked a location for the movie that he thought was in direct view of surveillance cameras.
Special prosecutor Dan Webb ripped the actor for “lying” on the stand and “insulting” the jury’s intelligence as he was seen celebrating the conviction late Thursday.
“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 railed. That verdict is a resounding message by the jury that in fact Mr. Smollett did exactly what we said he did.”
In the end game, the trial came down to whose story was more believable, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo’s or Smollett’s, the brothers won.
Smollett paid the Osundairos brothers $3,500 to pose as his attackers so he could get attention, exploited tense race relations for his own gain.
“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.
One of the two brothers, Abimbola Osundairos, who is now an amateur boxer, testified that the actor gave him specific lines he wanted them to deliver — “‘Empire,’ f—-t, n—-r, MAGA” — and then gave blow-by-blow instructions.
“He wanted me to punch him but he wanted me to pull the punch so I didn’t hurt him and then he wanted me to tussle him and throw him to the ground and give him a bruise,” Abimbola testified. Then he wanted it to look like he was fighting back, so I was supposed to give him a chance to fight back and then eventually throw him to the ground and my brother would tie the noose around his neck and pour bleach on him.”
During a “dry run” two days later, Abimbola testified that Smollett showed him and his brother a specific site where he wanted them to act the scene. The location was in direct view of surveillance cameras because he “wanted to use the camera footage for media,” Abimbola said.
The brothers admitted to finding the actor’s request very odd but decided to take part in it because Smollett was famous and could help them build their acting careers down the line.
“I mentioned to Ola that I did feel indebted to Jussie and that he’s helped me out and he could actually further our acting career and Ola agreed,” Abimbola said.
Smollett sparked international outrage with the hate crime he said he was a victim of and then disgust when police later found out that he made the whole thing up.
