The recent trials we’ve been following have contained enough human pain to make us shudder: The Kyle Rittenhouse case involved two dead Americans; the matter in Georgia was about who caused the death of the 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery; the yet-unresolved Ghislaine Maxwell affair has a backdrop of the cynical abuse of scores, if not hundreds, of impressionable girls and young women over many years.
By those standards, the case of Jussie Smollett has been comic relief.
Smollett, a B-list TV actor, was not accused of either killing or hurting anyone. His trumped-up saga of a deliberately staged “racially motivated” attack usable for the purposes of personal promotion fits squarely into the Cook County tradition of darkly comic flim-flammery and low-bore corruption.
It matches up well with some of the cases famously recounted on the pages of the Chicago Tribune a hundred years ago by the crime reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, whose trial-room notebook would form the basis for the musical “Chicago.” Watkins would have loved writing about Smollett.
Once it became clear something fishy was in play, a conclusion reached Thursday evening by a jury of Smollett’s peers, this was a trial that was fun for everyone to discuss.
How was the scheme concocted? Were the two bodybuilding brothers, apparently Smollett’s accomplices, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Smollett’s Hamlet? Or were they closer to reincarnations of the classic “Saturday Night Live!” duo of Hans und Franz, here to pump anybody up? This case had a tabloid-friendly unspooling, with new twists and turns arriving almost every day.
But despite all the gossipy tweets and chatter and opinions, there were real victims here. That would be everyone in the future who actually becomes the victim of a violent hate crime, being as Smollett’s phony version only seeds needless doubt for the real incidents that surely will follow.
His idea of exploiting such an attack for publicity certainly worked with politicians on Twitter, especially since Smollett had plenty of connections and the immediate backing of a huge PR firm, thanks to his network, Fox Entertainment.
“This was an attempted modern day lynching,” tweeted Kamala Harris at the time, praising Smollett’s kindness. “This attack was not ‘possibly’ homophobic,” wrote Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, going after anyone holding back judgment, “it was a racist and homophobic attack.” “What happened today to Jussie Smollett must never be tolerated in this country,” wrote Joe Biden.
Biden was right about that. Just not for the reasons he thought.
Even as these rushed statements appeared on social media, Chicago police had to get down to the nitty gritty of what exactly happened. By all courtroom accounts, the cops took this crime seriously, expending huge amounts of resources on trying to find who had attacked Smollett. Even Smollett said he had been treated with dignity and respect during the initial stages of the investigation. Chicago police get a lot of criticism, including plenty leveled by this page. In this matter, they behaved admirably.
With the aid of cameras and other clues, police quickly figured out all was not as it seemed, and the evidence for this all being faked was passed to Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx. That’s where things went off the rails, but not necessarily for the reasons most of the media is saying.
It’s tempting to see the Smollett case, whose cause was backed by attorney and influence peddler Tina Tchen, as another egregious example of Foxx’s go-soft approach and reluctance to prosecute criminals, especially since Smollett had made Chicago look like a haven for violent racists and homophobes.
But cooler, nonpartisan heads can understand that with all Chicago has to worry about in the sphere of crime, a first-time offense likely to result in probation probably was not worth allowing to suck up resources that could be spend on finding the actual killers on our streets. Foxx’s office was right to offer Smollett a quick deal, and correct to see that there were more important criminals for them to worry about.
But Foxx made one crucial mistake. She didn’t require Smollett to admit his guilt and apologize as part of his deal. He should have offered to do that: Had he done so, he would have avoided four felony convictions on his record and, over time, he likely could have resumed his career. But he did not do anything of the kind.
And that’s where Chicagoans both pragmatic and invested in fairness grew incensed, how a special prosecutor became involved and, frankly, how we ended where we ended up on Thursday evening when the jury delivered its verdict.
We know that people who are not on a TV show and friendly with politicians like Harris don’t get both a sweetheart deal from the prosecutor and the chance to walk around town protesting their innocence. At that point, the Smollett case became about special favors in a city with an egregious history of them. And thanks to the jury, he ended up the loser, pending any appeals.
Smollett wasted a lot of time of some very busy people who have far more important issues to worry about than him. He embarrassed the politicians who supported him and he didn’t respect his own fans. Sure, he probably didn’t think it would ever come to all this, but he still didn’t have the guts to turn off the machine when only he could. Shame on him.
Still, we haven’t changed our mind about the limited severity of this crime, the hoopla notwithstanding, and we’ve no wish to see Smollett languish behind bars. We’d rather he admitted responsibility, got some help and performed meaningful public service.
Ideally right here in Chicago, a city whose reputation he slandered.
