The Smollett staged attack
An actor reported a racist and homophobic assault in Chicago in 2019. Detectives concluded he had paid two acquaintances to stage it. He was convicted, and the conviction was later thrown out over a broken plea agreement rather than over the facts.
Why this verdict
Confirmed on the investigative record — police findings, the brothers' testimony and a special prosecutor's report — and not on a standing conviction: the Illinois Supreme Court vacated the conviction in November 2024 on due-process grounds, expressly without reaching the merits.
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01The claim
As reported: that Jussie Smollett was attacked in the early hours of 29 January 2019 by two men who used racist and homophobic slurs, poured a chemical substance on him and placed a rope around his neck.
As this entry judges it: that the attack was arranged and paid for by Smollett himself.
02Where it came from
The report drew immediate national attention, in a period of heightened concern about hate crimes, and was treated as straightforwardly true by politicians and press. The Chicago Police Department assigned a large detail. The investigation turned when detectives traced two men seen on surveillance footage in the area — Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo, Nigerian-American brothers, one of whom had worked with Smollett on Empire — and found they had left the country hours after the incident.
03What the record shows
✓ CONFIRMED — It happened. The documents exist.
The evidentiary core is the brothers' account and what corroborated it. Under questioning and later under oath they said Smollett had recruited them, that they had rehearsed the route, and that they had been paid by cheque. Investigators recovered the cheque, phone records, and receipts for the rope and other materials purchased at a hardware store in the days before; surveillance footage placed the brothers in the area at the time. The Cook County grand jury returned a sixteen-count indictment in March 2019.
What followed is a procedural history that has to be stated carefully, because the verdict depends on separating it from the facts. State's Attorney Kim Foxx's office abruptly dropped the charges later that month in exchange for forfeiture of a $10,000 bond and community service. A judge appointed Dan Webb as special prosecutor; his 2020 report concluded that Smollett had staged the incident and separately that Foxx's office had abused its discretion in the disposal of the case. Smollett was re-charged, tried and convicted in December 2021 on five counts of felony disorderly conduct, and sentenced in March 2022. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed in December 2023.
On 21 November 2024 the Illinois Supreme Court reversed, unanimously. Its reasoning concerned the first dismissal: where a case is dropped by nolle prosequi as part of an agreement and the defendant performs his side, a second prosecution violates due process. The court did not review the evidence and did not find the attack real. It ordered the case dismissed.
So the verdict here does not rest on a conviction, because there is no longer one to rest on. It rests on the police investigation, the brothers' sworn testimony, the physical and financial corroboration, and the special prosecutor's findings — none of which the Supreme Court disturbed. Smollett has maintained throughout that the attack was real.
04What it cost
The case became the standard citation for the claim that reported hate crimes are routinely fabricated, a use unsupported by the data: false reports are a small fraction of hate-crime complaints, and the FBI's figures show substantial under-reporting rather than over-reporting. Chicago police diverted a large detail; the city sued for the cost of the investigation. The Osundairo brothers were pulled into years of litigation. The most durable damage falls on people reporting real attacks, who now do so into an environment primed by one case that was not.