The Jussie Smollett Story Explained But Not Concluded

Most people have a vague memory of the Jussie Smollett story. The actor from the popular Lee Daniels show Empire claimed to have been attacked by MAGA lovers with a rope late at night during the Chicago polar vortex in 2019. The police found the guys who “attacked” him, and discovered that the whole thing was a set-up. Somewhat counterintuitively, despite the big stink over Smollett filing a false police report, prosecutors offer him a really good deal with no jail time and he took it.

At about this point, if not earlier, most people outside Chicago stopped paying attention. A special prosecutor was summoned to prosecute Smollett despite the double jeopardy issue. It was only just last year that the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that no, the regular prosecutor may not weasel out of a plea agreement by summoning a special prosecutor to pursue the exact same charge.

The just-released Netflix documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett? mostly assumes the viewer has some idea why the case was such a big deal. In case you don’t, though, or to help you no matter where you got bored by the actual case, the documentary explains it pretty well as it goes on. In fact, its chronological editing, starting with the bodycam footage from the night/morning of the attack, provides one of the biggest clues that something is up. Long before the police found the Osundairo brothers who “attacked” Smollett, the police were acting like they don’t believe Smollett. While the cops who agree to on-camera interviews avoid this chronological incoherence, a reporter on their beat notes that his sources were calling the case “bullshit” almost immediately, something he had never seen them do in the decade he’d been covering Chicago crime.

Now, there’s two ways to interpret that. One, that the police were just very confident that Smollett was making the story up. The other is that they decided early on the story they liked best and twisted the evidence to suit it. One of the big services The Truth About Jussie Smollett does as true crime style retrospective journalism is that it clearly explains all the evidence arrayed against Smollett. And it’s nowhere near as conclusive as you would expect given that everyone now assumes he was lying.

In short, the police tried to follow a trail of random CCTV footage after the attack, eventually leading to a dead end. Then they tried to do the reverse, to see if they could see where the men who attacked Smollett came from. The police claim that they arrived in the area on a rideshare, inexplicably switching to a regular taxi partway there. We don’t actually see the footage establishing this. Supposedly, the only rideshare in that area at that time of day was on the account of one of the Osundairo brothers, Abel and Ola, both of whom worked as extras on Empire and knew Smollett personally.

If this doesn’t sound like very impressive evidence that’s because it isn’t, and it’s hard to imagine the police could have made a case against the brothers for attacking Smollett or for participating in the hoax if the brothers hadn’t confessed in hour 47 of the 48 that Chicago police are allowed to hold persons of interest in a case without charges. Why would they confess to a crime they couldn’t be charged with? Well, the explanation for that is fairly straightforward. When the police searched the Osundairo’s home, they found guns. One of the brothers is a convicted felon, and that parole violation alone could send him back to jail. As it happened, however, neither Osundairo brother was ever charged with anything, and both became minor right wing celebrities for standing up against an apparent anti-MAGA calumny.

The brothers literally published a book, Bigger Than Jussie: The Disturbing Need For A Modern-Day Lynching. There’s a strong sort of irony in that. While Smollett’s incoherent scheme for fame and fortune by seemingly participating in a hoax destroyed his career for nothing, participating in that same hoax as idiot mercenary muscle ended up great for the Osundairo brothers.

One surprising omission of The Truth About Jussie Smollett? is any sort of evidence that the brothers were ever even in proximity to Smollett that night. Yes, there are rideshare records to somewhere a taxi ride away from the attack, and yes there’s the brothers’ own belated and self-interested testimony but nothing in any way conclusive. This doesn’t seem like it would be difficult evidence to find. Certainly you’d think their DNA would at least be on the rope, but no, it’s not, although as-yet unidentified DNA was found there.

Most incredibly of all, there were two witnesses, a neighbor claiming to see a suspicious looking white man with a rope in a backpack a couple of hours before the attack, and another who saw a white man run past his hotel after the attack took place. I had never heard of these witnesses before watching this documentary, and I doubt anyone else did either because their existence greatly complicates the slam dunk narrative of this definitely being a hoax we’re all so used to hearing.

What exactly was the dream scenario for Smollett, anyway, assuming this was a hoax? Was his reasoning that he’d need some sort of CCTV evidence to prove the attack happened, but not so much evidence that people could see the faces of his attackers and immediately notice that they’re not white? Smollett’s own story is quite straightforward by comparison — he had a celebrity stalker. So, while right-wing narratives can often be looking for victimhood, in this case, they have a case. The framing of this attack as generic racist homophobia — “MAGA” — is what allowed the hoax narrative to gain so much traction. Smollett himself makes it quite clear from the start that his attackers knew his celebrity identity and were targeting him specifically.

Until I watched this documentary, I honestly had no idea that this was an important part of the story from Smollett’s perspective. The news coverage in phase one made it sound like racist homophobes were just hanging out in the polar vortex in the middle of the night waiting for a random black gay person they could attack, not that they were staking out Smollett in particular. Nearly any such “suspicious” circumstances seem a lot less important when you recall that celebrity stalkers, by nature, have their own peculiar logic.

The Truth About Jussie Smollett? is about as balanced as documentaries come, the question mark at the end indicates that the filmmakers admit they are unsure about the outcome. The police are given as much time to tell their side of the story as Smollett and his defenders get for theirs, and they even get to go first, with only a very belated rebuttal. The attention to detail just doesn’t help their case because the case was so weak to begin with. Later discussions of the Chicago police department having big public relations issues in the 2010s, and the specific officers assigned to the Smollett case having an unusually high amount of ethical reprimands compared to their colleagues, only serves to compound an already ample amount of reasonable doubt that their case stands up.

If there’s any complaint I can make regarding The Truth About Jussie Smollett it’s that the documentary is just a little too tightly edited. At only eighty minutes in length, there are definitely nuances worthy of further discussion. But then, that’s all they would really be, is just nuances. The case is literally a case of he said, they said, where it’s probably impossible to know what actually happened. That the media circus ultimately came around to the position that yes, it was most definitely a hoax, largely on the basis of evidence provided by the Chicago Police Department that doesn’t hold up on close scrutiny… well, that’s subject matter for another documentary entirely.