From left: Empire star, Jussie Smollet, the Osundairo brothers.
The Chicago Jury after hours of listening to testimony from many witnesses found Empire Series Star, Jussie Smollet guilty of faking to the police a racist and homophobic attack on himself in 2019.
The Empire Star who played the character of ‘Jamal’ in the hip hop musical series was convicted nearly three years after he claimed two Trump-loving bigots beat him up, tied a noose around his neck and doused him in bleach in a misbegotten bid to raise public profile.
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According to reports, the 39-year-old actor who faced six counts in his case was found guilty of the first five counts, including disorderly conduct, and acquitted of the last count.
For Smollett, the verdict is the final chapter in the made-for-tv saga that jurors found Smollett not just starred in but directed from start to finish when he asked two men to “fake beat him up,” gave them a script of homophobic and racist slurs to deliver and selected a stage for the phoney beatdown that he thought was in direct view of surveillance cameras. PMNews reported.
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The jurors heard six days of testimony from 13 witnesses and after over nine hours of deliberations, they finally concluded.
However, without concrete evidence, the trial in Chicago criminal court came to an abysmal point leaving the court to wonder who’s story is believable: Smollet’s, or Nigerian brothers, Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo who claimed they were paid by smallet to stage the attack.
The defence also established that Smollet was the victim of a real hate crime and had called the brothers “sophisticated liars and criminals,” who later offered to recant their story and “tell the truth” in exchange for $2 million.
“He’s dumb enough to go into Obama’s city and pretend there are Trump supporters running around with MAGA hats? Give me a break,” defence attorney Nenye Uche told jurors in his closing arguments.
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“The brothers were like wolves disguised as sheep in the hen house.”
Prosecutors, however, said Smollett exploited tense race relations for his own gain and paid the Osundairos $3,500 to stage the attack so he could get attention.
“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.
The two brothers, who’d known the former “Empire” actor for about a year and a half before the alleged hoax, both delivered hours-long testimonies as the prosecution’s star witnesses.
Abimbola, 28, told jurors that he and Smollett met at a club in the fall of 2017 and soon became so close, he considered the actor to be a “brother.”
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On January 25, 2019, Abimbola said he received a text from Smollet asking him for some “help on the low,” he agreed to meet up with the actor, who brought up a piece of hate mail he received that showed a stick figure hanging and the words “You will die black f-g.”
“He talked about how the studio was not taking the mail seriously, the hate mail he’d received earlier,” Abimbola testified.
“I was confused, I looked puzzled and then he explained that he wanted me to fake beat him up.”
Abimbola, who is now an amateur boxer, claimed Smollett told him specific lines he wanted the brothers to deliver — “‘Empire’, f—-t, n—-r, MAGA” — and then gave blow-by-blow instructions.
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