The man who was allegedly victimized in what Vice President Kamala Harris once dubbed a “modern-day lynching” has been found guilty of concocting a phony attack.
A Chicago jury on Thursday convicted actor Jussie Smollett on five of six counts of disorderly conduct, stemming from his misleading police about an alleged hate crime. Smollett, who is black and gay, claimed that a pair of MAGA-clad white Trump supporters attacked him with fists, bleach, and a noose on a frigid night in January 2019.
Yet after observing all the evidence, including testimony from Smollett himself, jurors didn’t buy his story.
Smollett now faces up to 15 years in prison, according to The Washington Times. Legal experts told the AP, however, that it’s unlikely the former “Empire” actor will spend any significant time in jail.
Still, the verdict vindicated those, including Chicago police, who thought Smollett’s account of the incident was more of a script to promote liberal ideology than an actual crime.
Smollett’s fate actually seemed sealed when two Nigerian brothers who had befriended Smollett on the set of his show testified that he gave them money to buy supplies used in the “attack” and paid $3,500 to further the hoax. Video evidence backed up their account, including of Smollett making a “dry run” on the beating the night before it supposedly occurred.
The brothers, Abimbola and Olabingo Osundairo, also asserted that Smollett wanted the “crime” to garner media attention, without necessarily involving the police.
From the outset, Smollett’s account seemed beyond belief.
Forget about Trump-supporting thugs, whom Smollett claimed yelled “This is MAGA country” during the beatdown, recognizing and attacking Smollett as he left a Subway restaurant near 2 a.m. in subfreezing temperatures. Conservatives argued it all sounded phony that you could find Trump fans in a city where Democrat Hillary Clinton got 83 percent of the vote in 2016.
The issue now is whether liberals who immediately leaped to Smollett’s side, and denounced America as a racist hellhole for the attack, will recant.
Besides Harris, that list also includes now-President Joe Biden, who as a candidate at the time said that what happened to Smollett “must never be tolerated in this country.”
“We must stand up,” Biden continued, “and demand that we no longer give this hate safe harbor; that homophobia and racism have no place on our streets or in our hearts. We are with you, Jussie.”
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