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Chicago’s Special Prosecutor, Dan Webb, has finally indicted Jussie Smollett on six charges today for his publicity stunt where he hired two friends to pretend to attack him in an anti-gay, racist attack in January of 2019 and then accused his attackers as being Trump supporters.
He even held a press conference the next day still carrying a rope around his neck! He must have slept comfortably with it all night.
Smollett told Chicago police last year that two men physically attacked him and yelled racial and homophobic slurs. But prosecutors insist Smollett faked the racist, anti-gay attack on himself in the hopes that the attention would advance his acting career.
But with little explanation, authorities in March of 2019 abruptly dropped all charges against Smollett, abandoning the criminal case only five weeks after the allegations were filed. In return, prosecutors said, the actor agreed to let the city keep his $10,000 in bail.
[This sounds like a payoff, a $10,000 bribe to the city to drop the charges.]
The dismissal drew a swift backlash from the mayor and police chief and raised questions about why Smollett was not forced to admit what prosecutors had said they could prove in court - that the entire episode was a publicity stunt….
Smollett said two masked men shouted racial and anti-gay slurs, poured bleach on him, beat him and looped a rope around his neck. He claimed they shouted, "This is MAGA country" - a reference to President Donald Trump's "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan. He asserted that he could see one of the men was white because he could see the skin around his eyes.
Police said Smollett paid $3,500 to the two men, both of whom are black.
The men were brothers Abimbola "Abel" and Olabinjo "Ola" Osundairo, and one of them had worked on "Empire." An attorney for them, Gloria Schmidt, has said the brothers agreed to help Smollett because of their friendship with him and the sense that he was helping their careers. They declined to comment.
Schmidt said in a statement: "The Osundairo brothers were fully prepared to testify in any criminal proceeding in the Jussie Smollett case."