In a blockbuster ruling Thursday, the state Supreme Court overturned the conviction of actor Jussie Smollett for an alleged 2019 hoax hate crime, a move that will spare the former “Empire” star a five-month jail sentence, if not clear his name.
Smollett had challenged nearly every aspect of his case, arguing that he should have been done with the case after Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx’s office struck a deal to drop the charges, that the special prosecutor who re-investigated the case and re-indicted him a year later was wrongfully appointed.
Smollett spent six days in jail in 2022, before being released to wait out his appeals. An appeals court last year upheld Smollett’s sentence on five low-level felony counts related to lying to police about an attack he and two accomplices staged near his Streeterville apartment.
On the night of the staged attack, Smollett had been at the peak of his career, starring in a groundbreaking role as a Black, gay character on the hit TV series “Empire” and recording and touring as a musician. But Smollett would become a household name in the weeks after he called police to report he had been attacked by two men on the street as he walked home from a Subway on a frigid January night.
In the years that followed, Smollett’s career cratered. “Empire” was canceled, and Smollett became a punchline for late-night comedy shows. At his sentencing hearing in 2022, Judge James Linn observed that Smollett had endured severe punishment even before he handed down the restitution and jail time.
“You’ve destroyed your life as you knew it,” he said. “There is nothing any sentencing judge could do compared to the damage you’ve already done. … Your very name is a verb for lying. I can’t imagine anything worse than that.”
From the day of his arrest, Smollett has always maintained his innocence, including during two days that he spent on the witness stand at his 2021 trial. The actor sparred gamely with veteran attorney Dan Webb, a former federal prosecutor better known for his withering cross-examination of Adm. John Poindexter in the Iran-Contra affair.
At his sentencing, when Judge Linn ordered him taken from the courtroom to jail, Smollett rose from his seat and declared: “I did not do this. … I am innocent.”
In an interview last month with Entertainment Weekly — to promote a new film Smollett co-wrote and directed — he remained defiant, claiming to have spent about $3 million on his defense, even though it might have made more sense to have served out his time.
“I don’t want to have a felony on my record for something that I didn’t do,” Smollett said in part. “That’s what we’re fighting for. I know that on the surface it probably seems like why doesn’t he just serve the time, why doesn’t he just let this go. It would be easier if I had in fact done this to say that I did it.
“I’m a grown man and something happened. I can’t tell exactly what did happen, but I can tell you what did not happen, and that’s what I have to sit on. No matter how much people are yelling in my face, saying, ‘You’re a liar, you’re a liar, you’re a liar.’ No, I’m not. No, I’m not. I don’t want them to believe that, but if that is what they believe, that’s on you.”
The public at-large, and police sources quoted anonymously in news outlets like TMZ, seemed skeptical almost from the moment Smollett made his report.
He told police that he had been walking home after a late-night trip to Subway, when two men began punching him, hung a noose around his neck and squirted him with bleach while shouting racist, homophobic slurs at the openly gay, Black actor. Police stitched together surveillance camera footage to track down his two assailants, brothers Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo, who would go on to be star witnesses for the prosecution. Smollett, they testified, had paid them $3,500 to fake an attack because he was unhappy with his salary on “Empire” and disappointed that the production team had not been more concerned about threatening letters the studio had received.
Smollett, who gave a tearful interview about the attack on “Good Morning America,” was arrested for making false statements to police six days later.
Those charges were dropped in an unorthodox move by State’s Attorney Kim Foxx just a month after they were filed, with Smollett walking out of the Cook County Courthouse seemingly for the last time just weeks after he was charged.
Months later, a judge appointed Webb as special prosecutor to re-investigate Smollett’s case and examine how Foxx’s office handled the decision to drop the prosecution, with Smollett agreeing to give his $10,000 bond to the city with no admission of guilt.
Webb produced a 60-page report faulting Foxx and her staff for abusing prosecutorial discretion and possible ethical lapses, and— almost exactly a year after he walked out of court— a special grand jury handed up a six-count indictment against Smollett.