Monday marked five years since actor Jussie Smollett garnered widespread national attention after orchestrating a hate crime hoax.
Smollett, who is openly gay and black, claimed he was violently attacked in Chicago by two individuals he said poured an unknown substance on him, hung a noose around his neck, and beat him while yelling racial and anti-LGBTQ slurs. He also alleged that one of the perpetrators shouted “this is MAGA country,” at him, a reference to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, according to CNN.
Major media outlets covered the “hate crime,” giving the actor a lot of profile and a platform from which to rebut growing skepticism over his version of events.
Journalist Drew Holden posted screenshots on Monday of some of the social media posts pushed by mainstream media outlets at the time.
“Jussie Smollett was blunt, emotional and defiantly determined Saturday night at a concert, telling the crowd that he had to go on with the show because he couldn’t let his alleged attackers win,” posted MSNBC at the time.
“‘What kind of country do we live in’: Hollywood rallies behind ‘Empire’ actor Jussie Smollett after attack,” posted CNN.
A police investigation, however, concluded that Smollett had orchestrated the incident, purportedly paying a pair of acquaintances to rough him up so that he could post video footage — which he believed at the time would be captured by surveillance cameras in the area — of the “attack” on social media, presumably to cultivate sympathy and advance his acting career.
“Nothing could have been a more ready-made trap for the media to stumble into than an anti-black, anti-gay, pro-Trump hate crime hoax in early 2019,” quipped Holden.
Smollett was arrested less than a month after the staged attack and charged with making a false police report. He was sentenced to 150 days in jail and 30 months probation in March of 2022.
“You’re just a charlatan pretending to be a victim of a hate crime,” Cook County associate judge James Linn said to Smollett during sentencing, according to MSNBC.
According to FBI statistics, there were only around 11,000 reported hate crimes in 2022, comprising just 0.1% of the more than 7.7 million crimes clocked.
In Dallas, only 39 of the 110,341 crimes committed within Dallas’ city limits in 2023 were logged as hate crimes, less than 0.04% of all the offenses documented that year, according to the City of Dallas crime analytics dashboard.
