I write about hate crime hoaxes all the time and one of the things I usually say is that the punishment for faking a hate crime should be equal to that if the hate crime were real. Generally when people are busted for this kind of thing they get slapped with a civil summons equivalent to a parking ticket, but actor Jussie Smollett was just hammered by a grand jury on 16 felony counts for his hate crime hoax. It’s not quite what would have happened to the mythical racists he claimed attacked him if they were real, but it’s a lot more than a slap on the wrist.
Black gay actor Jussie Smollett claimed back in January that two racist homophobic Trump supporters attacked him, tried to lynch him, and poured bleach on him while yelling slurs. Here at Def-Con News we sniffed out this hoax instantly, but it took police and the media a little longer to figure out it was a lie. It turned out that Smollett paid a couple of dudes $3,500 with a check to help him stage a fake hate crime in a weird effort to advance his acting career.
Smollett was already charged with disorderly conduct for faking this hate crime, but as CBS Chicago reports, he’s in way deeper shit now:
Jussie Smollett is now facing deeper legal troubles after a grand jury returned 16 felony counts against the actor for falsely reporting a hate crime attack against him in January.
The grand jury returned the disorderly conduct charges on Thursday. He is scheduled to be arraigned on March 14. The specific allegations–“false report of offense”– are Class 4 felonies.
“Jussie Smollett knew that at the time … there was no reasonable ground for believing that such offenses had been committed,” read the indictment.
The counts focus on allegedly false statements he made to two different Chicago Police officers. Each count covers various alleged acts that Smollett falsely described to the officers–including that he was hit by two men, that they yelled racial and homophobic slurs and poured a chemical on him.
This should guarantee Smollett induction into the Bullshit Hall of Fame. His lie was so egregious that it was actually 16 separate lies. That’s got to be world record and both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are jealous.
“[The grand jury] decided he told multiple lies. There were going to charge him for each. If you have a crime, and that crime has multiple parts to it, you charge all those separate parts,” said legal analyst Irv Miller.
My guess is that the people of Chicago, who made up this grand jury, were pissed at Smollett for making their city look like shit and charged the hell out of him.
While 16 felony counts sounds like it would translate into a ton of jail time, Smollett is only looking at up to 3 years in prison. The reality is, he will probably get offered a plea deal to avoid jail altogether. The feds are still investigating, so maybe Smollett will get hit with some extra charges, but chances are he’s not going to pay the price he should for this.
I stand by my assertion that hate crime hoaxes should be punished like actual hate crimes. If two guys actually did this to Smollett, they’d likely get 10 years in prison. The same should happen to Smollett, plus he should have to repay the Chicago PD for the hundreds of thousands of dollars they spent investigating his bogus claim.
Also, it would be nice if all of the celebrities, democrats, and liberal media pundits apologized to President Trump, his supporters, and white people for believing Smollett’s bullshit story and condemning half the country as homophobic racists.
