Jussie Smollett’s Sideshow Mocks Real Tragedies
True to his profession, actor Jussie Smollett reacted to his sentence of jail time for his hate-crime hoax, with the passion of a courtroom drama.
As he was about to be escorted out of the courtroom in Chicago to begin serving 150 days in custody, he seemed to call up his own inner Atticus Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird” to say, “I am not suicidal.”
“OK,” said Judge James Linn, as sheriff’s deputies closed in to take him into custody. But Smollett repeated his declaration twice as he added that he respected the judge and his decision but, “Jail time? I am not suicidal. … If anything happens to me in there, I did not do it to myself.”
Say what? Was this another paranoid vision dreamed up like his hate-crime hoax? Or was he reaching for martyrdom references to add a little drama before the final curtain on his misadventure?
At least he could have said he was sorry. A spoonful of contrition for the trouble he had caused at taxpayers’ expense might have helped him to avoid jail time.
Besides the five months he was sentenced to serve in Cook County Jail, Linn also sentenced the actor to three years of probation and ordered him to pay $130,160 in restitution to the city to cover the more than 1,000 hours in police overtime it took to investigate Smollett’s false report.
In the end, the judge said jail time was warranted because of the serious damage he’d inflicted on the city as well as the true victims of hate crime.
That sounds appropriate. The whole wackadoodle scheme defied plausibility from the beginning.
The city will not soon forget how, in the frigid early hours during the polar vortex in January 2019, the now-former “Empire” star who is Black and gay claimed he had been viciously attacked. Two masked assailants yelled homophobic and racist insults, and declared “This is MAGA country,” he said, as they beat and kicked him, put a makeshift noose around his neck, and “poured an unknown liquid” on him before he managed to fight them off.
But even as his case sparked national outrage as a metaphor for systemic racism, it unraveled like a cheap sweater as police combed the city on fruitless search for suspects.
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