Jussie Smollett Trial: Jury Chosen, Prosecution Will Call First Witness Tuesday Morning
Jussie’s lawyer claimed he is the real victim in all of this.
Former Empire actor Jussie Smollett’s trial began on Monday with jury selection and opening statements.
Smollett faces charges brought against him in February 2019 and February 2020 of faking a hate crime and lying to police in January 2019. He claimed two men in ski masks attacked him around 2 AM on that cold January night on the way to Subway. The men supposedly yelled racial and homophobic slurs at him, put a rope around his neck, and yelled, “This is MAGA country.”
You can read our previous coverage by clicking this link.
The Charges
Then a grand jury indicted Smollett on six new charges in February 2020:
Each count of disorderly conduct represents an instance during Jan. 29, 2019, and then on Feb. 14, 2019, in which Smollett allegedly lied to police.
Count 1 accuses him of telling responding Chicago Police Officer Muhammed Baig at around 2:45 a.m. — some 45 minutes after the purported attack — that he’d been the victim of a hate crime. He said two attackers put a rope around his neck. Count 2 refers to Smollett telling the same officer he was a victim of a battery, describing attackers beating and pouring bleach on him.
Counts 3 and 4 are when Smollett made the same claims but to a different officer, Kimberly Murray, later that morning — at just before 6 a.m.
Count 5 accuses Smollett of again telling Murray at around 7:15 p.m. that he was the victim of a battery. Count 6 refers to Smollett reporting on Feb. 14, 2019, to detective Robert Graves that he’d been a victim of an aggravated battery.
All three officers are expected to testify.
Since Smollett does not have a criminal history and no one got hurt he might not spend any time in jail. The judge might sentence him to probation.
Jusse Smollett Indictment -… by Legal Insurrection
Opening Statements
But Chicago is ticked off because the alleged fake hate crime took time away from investigations of other crimes and cost a lot of money. We all know Chicago has a huge crime problem.
The jury consists of six men and six women with two women alternates.
The jury faces one question: “Did Smollett in fact orchestrate a phony hate crime on himself, then lie to police about being a victim?”
Special prosecutor Dan Webb alleged Smollett faked the hate crime in January 2019 with brothers Abimbola and Olabingo Osundairo:
Webb said Abimbola will testify that days before the incident, Smollett texted him asking for help “on the low.” The two later talked in Smollett’s car, with the actor telling him specifically he wanted them to shout a racial epithet and “MAGA!” to make it seem like the assailants were racist supporters of President Trump.
“I want you to attack me, but when you hit me, I want you to kind of pull your punches a bit because I don’t want to get seriously hurt,” Webb said Smollett told the brothers. Smollett also instructed them to put a rope around his neck to “make it look more like a lynching, like a hate crime,” Webb said.
The three men went on a “dry run” before the attack, part of which was captured on surveillance camera, Webb said. Smollett’s Mercedes can be seen circling the Streeterville intersection, showing the brothers the area where he wanted the attack to occur, Webb said.
Webb said police “reacted swiftly” to Smollett’s allegation, putting the “full force” of the department on the case. At one point they had 26 officers and detectives working it, tallying over 3,000 man hours, according to Webb.
Defense attorney Nenye Uche placed the blame on the brothers: “They are sophisticated, highly intelligent criminals. … Jussie thought he had a friend, but that friendship ran one way, it was a one-way street.”
It’s all about Jussie’s truth because that’s all that matters I guess:
In his opening remarks, Uche said there’s no physical or forensic evidence tying Smollett to the alleged hoax. He also said there’s no evidence Smollett was upset with situation at “Empire.”
“Jussie was not a person who liked attention. Even his publicist was frustrated at him for that,” he said. “It’s fantasy.”
Uche also pointed out that the Osundairo brothers, who only accused Smollett after they were arrested upon return from a trip to Nigeria, were the only ones who have changed their story.
“From the very first moment, Jussie’s truth, what he said happened, has remained constant, it has remained consistent, it has not changed. There has not been a Part 1, there has not been a Part 2 … because it’s the truth.”
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Comments
Didn’t Mullet write the brothers a check for their work? And on the memo line didn’t he write “Fake the Hate”? I seem to remember that vividly as my own truth.
No, it didn’t. The memo line read, “5 week Nutrition/Workout program (Don’t Go)”. All that other stuff is just fake internet meme junk.
https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/jussie-smolletts-3500-check-texts-brothers-alleged-attack/story?id=61293323
The memo was a meme, but everything else reported was fake.
I’m betting if he’s found guilty (which is obviously true) BLM will riot.
Riots in Chicago are dangerous with all the shootings they have.
The danger is that you might overlook the riot completely in all the usual carnage.
I’m worried that some rioters will get shot and the FBI will arrest some MAGA folks in a neighboring state.
Doubtful. Juicy Sommelier isn’t exactly popular in Chicago, but at the same time any excuse for a smash and grab. We’ll see.
Allen the Barbershop guy wrote a song about Jesse Smollett.
https://youtu.be/N1uGsFrA4wo
“Jussie was not a person who liked attention………”
Riiiiiiighhht……….here he is just trying to keep to himself and heal his many wounds.
https://youtu.be/swR62rgXwaA
Here’s Mr. introvert again:
https://youtu.be/pXLx5OY21Bk
He’s an actor for crying out loud. Their careers hinge on attention
The thing is, if some innocent white person had been picked up walking in the general vicinity that night fitting the description Smollett gave they would be in prison right now.
I don’t understand why Subway hasn’t dropped Megan Rapinoe to pick up on Jussie.
I mean, he’s famous, plus he’s the most loyal 2AM customer they have!
Gargamel is still doing Subway’s marketing, isn’t he?
Justice for Jussie!
As in 2 to 3 years in state prison.
You have GOT to watch Dave Chappelle’s hilarious routine on Smollet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZXoErL2124
He is a racist.
When he is found guilty and continues to deny his hate crime, the judge should throw the book at him and have each count’s sentence be run consecutively!
Given the incredible resources – including manpower and MONEY – invested in the initial investigation, their should be real jail-time, 12-months minimum. Unfortunately, I think the chances this idiot spends any time behind bars are extraordinarily low. Chicago doesn’t even aggressively pursue illegal weapons cases.
There should ALWAYS be jail time for these types of crimes, even if just a week.
What a mendacious, self-serving, avaricious, dishonest, sociopath Dhimmi-crat. Happy to slander Trump-supporters and to have innocent people arrested and prosecuted, while he played the victimized homosexual “of color” who had allegedly been brutalized, Happy to bask in the sympathies of a fawning and gullible media who swallowed his easily-debunked lies.
This idiot is a sociopath with a capital “S.”
Concur. I always hesitate to make Biblical arguments, but then I’ve gotten even atheists to admit that just because something is condemned the Bible doesn’t mean one should then decide that the opposite course of action is best. The commandment that says murder is wrong, for instance, doesn’t mean atheists can’t agree that murder is wrong.
The Old Testament punishment for bearing false witness is that the malicious witness needs to bear the same punishment as their intended victim would have received had the witness gotten away with their lies. What if the police had found two white guys who fit Smollet’s description and who couldn’t provide a strong enough alibi and Smollett had gone along with the frame job by testifying for the prosecution. This has happened before; plenty of people locked up for years before being ultimately exonerated despite being positively identified by eye witnesses. Usually the eye witness is simply mistaken but not always. I recall a case in the South, I believe Atlanta, when 3 White off-duty Soldiers were framed for a racially charged murder; 3 White guys had killed a black guy. These 3 Soldiers had stopped to ask a police officer for directions to a location where they were invited to a bachelor party. A purported eyewitness saw them talking to the cop and claimed they were the perpetrators. The kicker? He was a Black minister who knew those three weren’t the killers, but he was worried about rioting and looting unless someone went to prison for the crime. The fact of the matter is that liberation theology is a heresy. Black liberation theology is a particularly vile strain of this kind of heresy. If you’ve ever read anything by James Cone, the inventor of Black liberation theology, then you’ll know he wrote that if a Jesus didn’t exist that served the political interests of the Black community then they’d have to reject the historical Jesus and invent another. Which is what he and other like minded Black “theologians” proceeded to do.
Their inspiration, of course, were Marxist Central/South-American priests inventing a communist Jesus to serve the political interests of the peasants/proletariat against the bourgeoisie landlord/banker oppressors. We see a similar heresy from our own “devout Catholic” Democrat pols like Pelosi and Biden who claim if you don’t fall in line with their disastrous social and economic policies (particularly handing over your rights and bank accounts to fight the “Climate Catastrophe hoax) you ain’t Christian.
In any case this minister’s version of the Ten Commandments had a racial exemption to the 9th Commandment. At least theoretically as a minister he doesn’t have an excuse for making a conscious decision to falsely accuse three men he knew were innocent of murder. But then a lot of Black “reverends” make a fortune being more media celebrities/politicians than as actual ministers. But then so do a lot of White “men-of-the-cloth;” I give you Father Pflager of Chicago.
Of course you don’t need to believe the Bible is God’s word to see the problem of giving people who falsely accuse people of crimes they didn’t commit (and make no mistake, that’s exactly what Smollet did if not by name). As the saying goes, when you feed cats you breed cats. After Tailhook broke in the news back in the early 1990s then the Democrats in Congress, wanted scalps and as we see today with the Rittenhouse trial if they need to violate due process to get those scalps they’ll gladly do it.
So the Navy lowered the bar for convicting a man of sexual harassment to the point where to be accused was to be convicted, but raised the bar for prosecuting an accuser of making a false accusation that it was almost impossible to make the charge stick. I did two tours at an intel command in Japan. We shared a building, even some office space, with a cryptologic command. There was one female petty officer at that command who just loved to cause trouble for our command, and she was very open about it. I recall one Sunday I’m at work catching up on a few things. She’s talking to two Chiefs in her command and they’re all swearing blue streaks. Naturally she doesn’t take offense because thy write her evals and she was sucking up. But then I heard her say, “Watch this.” She walked out to the intelligence watch floor, and then hangs around long enough to hear someone say something far milder than the cussing she had just engaged in and pretended to take offense.
Up until that point we had allowed the watch standers to watch football games on Sundays as long as they weren’t distracted from their work; if they got busy then they had to shut the TV off. After that, no more football as someone might say something like, “Dallas is going to kick the Redskins’ ass.”
I told the CO/XO/Department heads that it was a deliberate set-up and that it was a false complaint, but for CYA purposes they had to pretend it was real.
Another, even more blatant example was a female Ensign who was angry at the command because she wasn’t getting an end-of-tour award. She had gotten a Navy Achievement Medal just three months earlier and hadn’t done anything to deserve a second award, and three of us told her that after we listened to her angry rant. She didn’t care; she vowed to take revenge. She promised to “throw a grenade through the door on her way out.”
So she filed a sexual harassment claim against the skipper after she transferred out. We had to go through a complete IG inspection despite the fact that three witnesses told the investigators that she had simply filed a false complaint to take revenge on the command. It didn’t matter; unless some accuser was stupid enough to put everything she intended to do in writing then there was no way the Navy was going to take action.
Surprisingly, some women are stupid enough to put their intention to file a false claim of sexual harassment or assault in writing, particularly if they’re trying to convince another Sailor or Marine to go along with their plans. On one memorable occasion, using their USG computer to send an email to a potential co-conspirator and accidently hitting the “send all” button so everyone on the command distro list got it. That proved impossible to deny.
I’m sick and tired of the #believeallwomen crowd who really mean believe some women but not others if they’re credibly accusing a Dem pol who still of some use. Like when Juanita Broderick credibly accused Bill Clinton of rape (she did have a bloody lip, and she didn’t wait years to tell friends and family but told them at the time) or when Tara Reade credibly accused Joe Biden of digitally violating her.
I’m often told that if I’m going to believe Clinton’s or Biden’s accusers then I HAVE to believe Trump’s or else I’m a hypocrite. The problem with that theory is that Clinton went on national TV to lie about Lewinski. His story fell apart like wet paper mache. Then the story shifted to, “Everybody lies about sex.” The problem of course was that Clinton was being sued for sexual harassment by Jennifer Flowers at the time, the Democrats’ own 1992 VAWA act specifically made someone’s work place conduct a relevant line of inquiry if one could establish similar conduct, and in any case there are people who served time in jail for lying about sex even in a civil case if the issue before the court involves sex. Committing perjury and suborning perjury are crimes no matter what the civil suit is about.
And I’ve seen Gropey Joe consistently violate the space of subordinates’ wives and children who clearly didn’t want him fondling them and sniffing their hair. Have you seen the recent video of a little girl who was being held by her mom using her fist to know Biden’s arm away when he tried to do the usual job on her?
Trump never did anything he was ever accused of right in front of my eyes. And at least some of those accusations were simply not credible. I recall one accusation falling apart when an accuser’s tale of sexual assault in a high-end NYC department story dressing room simply couldn’t have happened due to what was then the lay out of the store.
Could he have committed some of the acts he was accused of? Sure, I suppose. But the difference between him and Clinton/Biden is that Clinton was actually disciplined by the judge in the Jennifer Flowers case. I’ve seen Biden actually do the things he’s accused of. And Secret Service agents have filed formal complaints against Biden for his blatant exhibitionism (he likes to have female agents forced to watch him swim in the nude) and at least one agent filed a complaint that Biden had groped his girlfriend’s butt at a social event the couple were invited to attend as guests.
These are matters of public record. When a fashion writer makes an accusation in a book that isn’t a public record.
Women who file false accusations of sexual harassment, or rape should suffer the same fate as the men who they falsely accused would have suffered (according to the FBI it is rare for a man seeking revenge to file a false accusation of these kinds of crimes; they usually file false claims of aggravated assault or attempted murder).
And hate crime hoaxers should suffer the same fate as anyone accused of a similar hate crime would have suffered. Those hoaxes are so common my default position is it’s a lie until I see some evidence. Particularly when it involves a college or university. Almost always it turns out that the person who filed the complaint committed the act themselves. As is the case here.
Jussie Smollett needs to go to prison.
Up until yesterday, I was under the impression that Kim Foxx had successfully swept the whole incident under the rug forever and nothing would ever be done about this celebrity race hustler. I’m glad to see him being punished by the process, just like any of us would be.
1) Black celebrity with connections to the Obamas.
2) This is Chicago where the government hates the police.
3) There is a [false] claim of a racist act by a) whites and b) Trump supporters.
4) The normal process had already let him get away with it and it to extraordinary efforts to have his actions placed in their legal place.
5) Tossing in the threat of riots AND the fact that there is no longer a rule of law in this country.
Smollett will not be found guilty AND will sue the city of Chicago and win beaucoup bucks from Chicago’s taxpayers.
This will be called “justice” if there are sufficient riots.
Subotai Bahadur
Smollett lied about his attackers for some reason….
Smollett told officers that the primary attacker “was wearing a ski mask that covered his entire face, with the exception of the area around his eyes, by which (Smollett) could tell the attacker was white-skinned,” – USAToday, 4/11/19
No doubt those Nigerian bros had clear Chi-Town/Midwestern accents when shouting all those homophobic and racial slurs, too