One sub-zero night on a deserted Chicago street, a gay black actor is attacked by two white supremacists who knock him to the ground, pour bleach over him and try to lynch him before he manages to fight them off.
Given its brutality, it’s little surprise that the attack on Jussie Smollett in January 2019 became a national scandal, summing up for many Americans just how much racial and homophobic hatred had been allowed to fester under the Trump administration.
Smollett, star of the hit TV series Empire and one of the first black, gay actors to play a leading character, related how one of his masked attackers had shouted, ‘This is MAGA country’ — a reference to former President Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign slogan.
He said they also hurled racial and anti-gay abuse, and slipped a noose around his neck.
The actor suggested that he’d been singled out because of his public criticism of the Trump administration.
The actor, who starred with Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant, is accused of lying to police after orchestrating a fake hate-crime against himself. The two ‘attackers’, now giving evidence against him, aren’t a pair of redneck racists but two black Nigerian men who pumped iron with Smollett at the gym
Anti-gay, anti-black and pro-Trump — with horrifying echoes of the Ku Klux Klan and the nightmare era of lynchings — the hate-filled assault understandably provoked a storm of outrage among America’s liberal Left. White supremacists have long been its favourite bogeymen.
Hollywood actors, pop stars and Democrat politicians howled with anger on Twitter.
Vice President Kamala Harris, then a Californian senator, called it an ‘attempted modern-day lynching’, describing Smollett as ‘one of the kindest, most gentle human beings I know’.
Now, nearly three years later, the furore has finally resulted in a prosecution, but it isn’t Smollett’s attackers who have gone on trial in Chicago this week — it’s Smollett.
To the horror of ‘progressive’ America, which never once treated his claims as anything but the truth, even as questions began to appear about his account, he has been accused of the most cynical deceit.
The actor, who starred with Michael Fassbender in Alien: Covenant, is accused of lying to police after orchestrating a fake hate-crime against himself. The two ‘attackers’, now giving evidence against him, aren’t a pair of redneck racists but two black Nigerian men who pumped iron with Smollett at the gym.
Smollett, 39, faces six counts of disorderly conduct for allegedly making false reports to police. He denies the charges.
Accused Smollett with Barack and Michelle Obama. To the horror of ‘progressive’ America, which never once treated his claims as anything but the truth, even as questions began to appear about his account, he has been accused of the most cynical deceit
Citing text messages and bank accounts, prosecutors say Smollett paid Abimbola Osundairo and his brother Olabinjo $3,500 (£2,636) to stage the attack in the belief it would generate so much sympathetic publicity it would enable him to negotiate a pay rise with the producers of Empire.
Smollett’s lawyer has said these payments were for training to prepare for an upcoming music video, and had no connection to the alleged plan to stage an attack.
But prosecutors insist there was a highly elaborate deception.
Abimbola testified on Wednesday that the actor had shown him a photo of a letter he’d been sent, with a drawing of a gun pointing at a tree from which a stick figure was hanging by a noose. It read: ‘Smollett, Jussie you will die.’
The actor told him he was upset that Cinespace Studios, where he was filming, wasn’t treating security issues and hate mail sufficiently seriously.
‘Then he proceeded to tell me he wanted me to beat him up,’ he told the court. Osundairo, an amateur boxer, admitted he was ‘confused’.
He went on: ‘Then he explained that he wanted me to fake beat him up. He told me that we would need another person to fake beat him up and he mentioned could my brother do it? I said yes.’
Osundairo said that he and Smollett had developed a brotherly bond since he met the actor while working as an extra in Empire. Osundairo would obtain illegal drugs for him, while Smollett advised him on his acting career, he told the court.
The actor also told him to use an anti-gay slur and shout ‘MAGA’ during the attack in which they were to slip the noose around his neck, before pouring bleach over him and running away, the court heard.
Two days before the incident, they even carried out a dress rehearsal as Smollett wanted the attack to be captured on nearby video cameras, said
