Jussie Smollett breaks silence on the 2019 controversy over staging a hate crime

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For Jussie Smollett, there are clear-cut perpetrators in the story of the 2019 case that sent his once-ascendant career into a death spiral.

“The villains are the two people who assaulted me, the Chicago Police Department and, if I may be so brave, the mayor,” he says. He’s referencing Rahm Emanuel, who held the city’s top job from 2011 to 2019 and is the brother of Hollywood power broker Ari Emanuel.

Smollett is making forays into rebooting his career as an actor, a director and a recording artist. But to do so, he needs to clear up this case, or at least attempt to: We’re speaking just after news broke of a new documentary, “The Truth About Jussie Smollett?,” which will stream on Netflix on Aug. 22 and features an interview with Smollett. The former “Empire” star says that the Chicago establishment conspired to frame him: He claims he experienced a hate crime, one that the world came to believe he faked. Why would the Chicago P.D. and Emanuel do this? He answers the question with two questions.

“Could it be that they had just found out about the missing minutes and the missing tape from the murder of Laquan McDonald? Could it be that the mayor helped hide that?” Smollett asks, referencing the case of a Chicago cop killing a Black teenager that prompted a federal judge to require the CPD to undertake dozens of reforms just two days after Smollett reported being attacked. “We’re living in a world where the higher-ups, their main mission, in order to do all of the underhanded things that they’re doing, is to distract us with the shiny object.” (Rahm Emanuel declined comment.)

Now, Smollett is getting worked up as he holds fast to his original story that two MAGA supporters wearing masks shouted racist and homophobic slurs at him before putting a noose around his neck and splashing him with bleach on a frigid night. He is speaking via Zoom from London; it’s a follow-up to a lengthy sit-down in Los Angeles. My first meeting with Smollett had ended on a cliff-hanger, as he was working up to discuss his innocence. Now he’s finally ready. He won’t directly criticize the brothers, who wrote the book “Bigger Than Jussie: The Disturbing Need for a Modern-Day Lynching” and have popped up on Fox News. But he also maintains that they weren’t the attackers, as they testified under oath.

“All I can say is, God bless you, and I hope it was worth it,” he says. “Every single other person’s story has changed multiple times. Mine has never. I have nothing to gain from this.”

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"I can’t sit and tell you exactly, beat by beat, what happened. I can only tell you what did not happen. And what did not happen is the story that’s been out there for almost seven years, that somehow I would have even a reason to do something as egregious as this."

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