CHICAGO (LifeSiteNews) — Disgraced left-wing actor Jussie Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in prison, 30 months on probation and more than $140,000 in financial penalties for his infamous 2019 fabrication of a right-wing hate crime against himself in one of the bluest cities in America.
In January 2019, the gay actor best known for his work on the drama Empire claimed he was assaulted in Chicago when two masked men allegedly shouted racial and “homophobic” epithets, beat him to the point of fracturing a rib, put a rope around his neck, and poured bleach on him. “This is MAGA country,” they allegedly yelled, a reference to former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.
Numerous left-wing figures, including future President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, aggressively pushed the narrative that the incident was part of a wave of Trump-inspired hate and violence. But critics immediately questioned the likelihood of violent Trump supporters roaming around the streets of strongly-Democratic Chicago, suspicions that intensified after police failed to find video of the attack among hundreds of hours of footage from cameras near where the actor says it happened, and Smollett only gave police “limited and redacted” phone records.
Two potential “attackers” were soon identified, but rather than pro-Trump whites they were two Nigerian brothers with ties to Empire. It was then reported that police suspected Smollett of paying them to stage the attack, and Smollett was officially charged in February 2019 with filing a false police report and indicted on 16 counts of disorderly conduct stemming from the offense, though left-wing Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped the charges in March of that year.
Special Prosecutor Dan Webb revived six counts a year later, however, and Smollett was convicted on five of them in December 2021, including of falsely telling multiple police he was a hate crime victim and battery victim.
On Thursday, Smollett was denied his appeal for a new trial and sentenced to 150 days in prison, 30 months probation, and a $25,000 fine, as well as ordered to pay $120,106 restitution to the City of Chicago.
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After the sentence was handed down, Smollett was given an opportunity to address the court, which he used for another dramatic display. “I am not suicidal,” he repeated several times, his voice rising.
“I am innocent, and I am not suicidal,” he declared. “If I did this, then it means that I stuck my fist in the fears of black Americans in this country for over 400 years and the fears of the LGBTQ community. Your honor, I respect you and I respect the jury, but I did not do this, and I am not suicidal. And if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself. And you must all know that.”
The New York Post reports that Smollett’s outburst followed Judge James Linn calling the actor a “disgrace.”
“You’re not the victim of a racist hate crime, you’re not the victim of a homopobic hate crime, you’re just a charlatan pretending to be the victim of a hate crime and that’s shameful especially,” Linn said. “You have another side of you that is profoundly arrogant and selfish and narcissistic and that bad side of you came out during the course of this.”
“Your performance on the witness stand, this can only be described as pure perjury,” he continued. “You got on the witness stand … you committed hour upon hour upon hour of pure perjury. Your very name has become an adverb for lying and I cannot imagine what could be worse than that.”
There is a long line of “hate crimes” against political liberals or sexual, racial, or religious minorities that the mainstream media seized upon but were later revealed to be fabricated.
Additionally, left-wing activists often present real crimes against minorities as evidence of bigotry regardless of the actual motives. In 2019, The Federalist’s Chad Felix Greene detailed how pro-LGBT media misrepresented three murders of gender-dysphoric individuals that year as examples of “transphobic” violence despite evidence indicating they were killed for unrelated reasons.
Every year, the LGBT pressure group Human Rights Campaign publishes lists of transgender murder victims as proof of an “epidemic” of anti-LGBT violence, but for most examples fails to identify an LGBT-related motive. According to federal crime statistics, the transgender murder rate is actually far lower than the overall murder rate.