United States actor Jussie Smollett has been sentenced to almost five months in prison after he was found guilty of lying to the police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic hate crime in 2019 (an attack prosecutors said he staged himself).
The 39-year-old African-American was found guilty of “planning” the fake assault by paying two Nigerian brothers the sum of $3,500 and lying to police in his depositions in December.
While reading out the sentence, Chicago Judge James Linn said: “You really crave the attention and you wanted to get the attention.”
He said Smollett had a streak that was “profoundly arrogant and selfish and narcissistic.”
“This was premeditated to the extreme… You’ve destroyed your life as you knew it,” Limn said, adding that “you did damage to real hate crimes victims.”
He said Smollett was “just a charlatan, pretending to be a victim of a hate crime.”.
Smollett will serve the first 150 days of his sentence in prison as part of a total of 30 months on probation and must also repay $120,106 to the Chicago Police to cover their cost of investigation.
As the sentence was delivered, Smollett said: “I’m innocent, I did not do this.
“I’m not suicidal, if something happens when I’m in there [in jail] I did not do it to myself.”
Smollett’s family members and lawyers begged the judge for leniency and requested an alternative to prison, or for a suspended sentence.
Meanwhile, Smollett, the star of the hit television series “Empire” has always maintained his innocence.
He said two masked men who were supporters of former President Donald Trump attacked him in the middle of the night on January 29, 2019 in a street in Chicago.
He told police that his attackers made racist and homophobic slurs against him and put a noose around his neck.
Prosecutors alleged that Smollett hired two acquaintances, brothers Olabinjo and Abimbola Osundairo, to stage the attack while he was invoking Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan after the actor had gotten a legitimate piece of hate mail which according to him was not taken seriously by his employers.
The case took another twist when Cook County prosecutors dropped the initial 16 felony counts against him in March 2019.
He was however indicted in February 2020 by a Cook County grand jury, which handles crimes in Chicago, on six counts of disorderly conduct connected to the alleged false reporting.
