On January 22 of this year, actor Jussie Smollett received a threatening letter which had a stick figure hanging from a tree and a gun pointing towards it. "MAGA" was emblazoned across the envelope (Trump's slogan "Make America Great Again"), as well as the message "Smollett, Jussie you will die". There was also a white powder within the letter that was later determined to be Tylenol.
A week later on January 29, Smollett said that he had been attacked in Chicago's Streeterville neighbourhood by a pair of white men in ski masks, who had used racial and homophobic slurs before physically beating him, pouring a chemical substance on him and wrapping a rope around his neck. The actor also claimed that the duo had shouted "This is MAGA country" during the attack.
Immediately, politicians and celebrities rallied to Smollett's side, with presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker describing the attack as a modern-day lynching. Others weren't so convinced, with many on the far right side of politics slamming Smollett's story because of a lack of evidence, claiming it was a set-up to make Republicans and President Trump look bad.
Then came the debate over whether potential victims should be believed at face value and on their word. The Chicago Police Department certainly gave Smollett the benefit of the doubt, despite quickly finding his account suspicious. They began investigations which eventually led them to Abimbola and Olabinjo Osundairo - brothers of Nigerian descent who didn't at all fit the bill of the description given by Smollett. They were arrested on February 13, with bleach and other items from their home taken in by the authorities as evidence.
When news broke, the public was confused to say the very least. Those who had supported Smollett began to delete their social media messages of support and remained very quiet. Those on the right however only grew more confident in their claims of a hoax. Smollett remained firm in his claims of being attacked, but said nothing of whether it was the siblings. Let's face it, he didn't need to; these were two men of colour who certainly weren't responsible for a racist hate crime against him.
From this point, things only got stranger. The brothers were released on February 15, following interrogations which garnered new evidence for the police. A day later, CNN were told by two unnamed Chicago police sources that the new evidence indicated Smollett had actually paid the brothers $3,500 to stage the attack. A financial trail then found that the two purchased the rope found around Smollett's neck at the time of the attack, over the weekend of January 25.
On February 20, Smollett was charged with a class 4 felony for filing a false police report. The FBI are now also investigating whether the actor was involved in the sending of the threatening letter that he got the week before the 'attack'. Smollett surrendered himself at the Chicago Police Department's Central Booking station the day after, and has hired crisis manager Chris Bastardi to represent him in any upcoming case.
Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie T. Johnson later said in a press conference that his department had concluded the attack was staged by Smollett as a publicity stunt, in a bid to further his career because of his dissatisfaction with his salary. The authorities also alledge that the incident was tied to President Trump and racism in America to help further Smollett's career.
Smollett has since been released on bail after posting 10% of his $100,000 bond, but will return to face charges for which he is said to be mounting a heavy defence. The chaos surrounding this one shows no signs of slowing down...
Shades of Roxanne Pallett
In what would turn out to be Channel 5's last ever series of Celebrity Big Brother, audiences watched in horror as former Emmerdale star Roxanne Pallett accused former Coronation Street star Ryan Thomas of punching her in the ribs repeatedly, with force. Fortunately for Thomas, the incident was one caught entirely on camera, with footage proving that he didn't make contact with the actress at all. He went on to win the show.
Pallett had no trouble in rushing to the Diary Room at the time, demanding that she be given private quarters away from Thomas because she didn't feel safe around him. The public had no doubts that if the footage of the event didn't exist, Thomas would have been thrown off the show and his career would have been left in tatters. Pallett meanwhile, would likely be booking television work for a decade.
Once she was caught out, Pallett made the decision to leave the show of her own free will rather than face a live crowd, but would return for a pre-recorded interview with the show's host Emma Willis. There she apologised, but maintained that in that moment, she felt she had been assaulted. She had no answers for why she felt that way, but looked to have gotten to a point where she had repeated her own lies so much that she actually really believed them.
Where do we go from here?
Now we have to ask ourselves if it is always the best option to believe suspected victims of such attacks immediately on their word. Smollett has, if he's guilty of the charges filed against him, made it exponentially harder for real victims to be heard. One part of me wants to believe somebody as soon as they say they're abused or assaulted, but when cases like this rise to the surface you have to wonder just how many people have done a similar thing in the past.
There is no right answer. Both the left and right must come together in situations such as this one rather than hashing it out on social media, and simply await the authorities full investigation to be complete. Perhaps cases of this sort shouldn't make it into the public eye before investigations are over, but then you have the lack of help from civilians who may hold some answers to what has happened. Again, there is no right answer.
We seem to be living in an age of dangerous attention seeking, and the frightening thing is that we may just be scratching the surface. As we fight for likes and approval across social media, attempting to push political agendas through each message and ensuring that there is some sort of philosophical meaning to every sentence, we're doing ourselves a disservice. We are better than this. We must prove that, and soon.
Tagged in Jussie Smollett