Nearly three years after actor Jussie Smollett reported that two racist and homophobic men beat him up and tied a noose around his neck before throwing bleach on him, a jury has come to a conclusion. As you may already be aware, after Smollett filed a police report for the acts allegedly committed against him in January of 2019, his truth was questioned.
After deliberating for roughly a total of 16 hours, the jury found Jussie Smollett guilty.
According to the prosecution, it is believed that Jussie Smollett “exploited tense race relations for his own gain and paid the Osundairos [brothers] $3,500 to stage the attack so he could get attention,” the New York Post reported. As a result, prosecutor Dan Webb told the jury, “It’s clearly a violation of the law to go to the police and report to police a fake crime and tell police it’s a real crime.”
“To outright denigrate something as serious, as heinous, as a real hate crime, to denigrate it and then make sure it involved words and symbols that have such horrible historical significance in our country was just plain wrong to do it and he did.”
During the trial, the brothers accused of attacking Smollett revealed they had known the actor for about a year and a half before the incident took place. The Osundairos brothers testified on behalf of the prosecution saying that they were approached by Smollett after he received hateful letters in the mail.
“He talked about how the studio was not taking the mail seriously, the hate mail he’d received earlier,” Abimbola testified. “I was confused, I looked puzzled and then he explained that he wanted me to fake beat him up.”
Abimbola continued by saying Jussie went as far as to give him “blow-by-blow instruction,” according to the New York Post.
“He wanted me to punch him but he wanted me to pull the punch so I didn’t hurt him and then he wanted me to tussle him and throw him to the ground and give him a bruise. Then he wanted it to look like he was fighting back, so I was supposed to give him a chance to fight back and then eventually throw him to the ground and my brother would tie the noose around his neck and pour bleach on him.”
However, despite the accusations, Jussie Smollett has remained steadfast that his attack wasn’t a hoax and that he truly endured everything in the police report he made. During his own testimony, he told the jurors that “there was no hoax” and called the Osundairos brothers “liars,” saying that the $3,500 check he wrote them was for the meal and workout plans they created for him.
Smollett’s legal team, as the Associated Press reports, argued that the brothers attacked Jussie Smollett because they are homophobic and “didn’t like who he was.”