Jussie Smollett has opened up about the initial reaction to the alleged hate crime he was subjected to in 2019, which he was later accused of staging for publicity.
In Netflix’s new documentary The Truth About Jussie Smollett?, premiering Friday, the 43-year-old actor recalls feeling “like I was being eulogized” online as reports of his alleged hate crime rapidly circulated.
“I felt like I had died, and I was alive to see — and what people were saying was so kind, but it was too much for me,” he says in the film, according to People magazine. “It made me very uncomfortable. It made me extremely embarrassed. It made me feel extremely emasculated.”
Smollett previously starred on the music drama Empire from 2015 to 2019. He left the show after claiming that two men assaulted him, spouted racial and homophobic slurs, and tossed a noose around his neck in downtown Chicago, while he was filming the television show.
The two men — brothers, Abimbola “Bola” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo — later claimed that Smollett had hired them to stage the attack, a claim the actor has consistently denied. He was charged with filing a false police report, and his character was written out of the final season of Empire.
When the case went to trial, testimony alleged Smollett had paid $3,500 to two men he knew from Empire to carry out the attack. Prosecutors said he told them what slurs to shout and to yell that Smollett was in “MAGA country,” a reference to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign slogan.
“I believe he wanted to be the poster boy of activism for Black people, for gay people, for marginalized people,” says Bola in the new documentary. Ola adds: “I thought it was crazy, but at the same time, I’m like, ‘It’s Hollywood.’ This is how it goes.”
Prosecutors alleged at the time that the actor staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio’s response to hate mail he received while filming Empire.
In his own testimony, Smollett said that “there was no hoax” and that he was the victim of a hate crime in his downtown Chicago neighborhood. He has always maintained his innocence.
Despite this, a jury convicted him of five counts of disorderly conduct in 2021. He was sentenced to 150 days in jail — six of which he served before being freed pending appeal — 30 months of probation, and was ordered to pay approximately $130,000 in restitution. The Illinois Supreme Court overturned his conviction in 2024 because of a non-prosecution agreement he had entered into with the Cook County attorney’s office.
The Truth About Jussie Smollett? begins streaming on Netflix on August 22.
