Former Empire actor Jussie Smollett has been sentenced to 150 days in jail after he was convicted in 2021 on five felony counts of lying to the police.
In January 2019, Smollett, who is Black and gay, said he had been a victim of a racist and homophobic attack in Chicago, though evidence presented in court revealed he staged the attack and then told a false story to law enforcement.
Smollett is sentenced to a total of 30 months of felony probation, in which he will be allowed to travel. He also must pay a fine of $25,000 and more than $120,000 in retribution to the city of Chicago.
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“I’m not suicidal, I am innocent. I did not do it, your honor,” Smollett said after the sentence was handed down by Judge James Linn.
“The hypocrisy is just astounding,” Linn said, adding that he knew Smollett was brought up to be sensitive to issues of racial discrimination.
The judge said the actor has shown to have a side of himself that is “profoundly selfish and narcissistic,” though he acknowledged that Smollett had good qualities too.
Embattled actor Jussie Smollett was sentenced to 150 days in jail and 30 months’ probation Thursday for falsely reporting to police that he was the victim of a racist and homophobic attack in 2019.
“You’re just a charlatan pretending to be a victim of a hate crime,” Cook County Circuit Judge James Linn told Smollett while announcing the sentence in Chicago.
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Smollett responded by repeating, “I am not suicidal!” He said he was innocent and that “if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself,” referring to jail.
Smollett was convicted in December on five of six counts of disorderly conduct for making false reports to police that he was attacked in the early hours of Jan. 29, 2019, by two men yelling racial and homophobic slurs. He said the two men put a noose around his neck and threw an unknown substance at him, according to Chicago police.
“You put the noose around your own neck,” Judge James Linn said as he gestured to Smollett, who was sitting quietly with his hands clasped on the table in front of him.
“This was planned, it was premeditated to the extreme,” Judge James Linn said in laying out what he considered an aggravating factor during sentencing. “You wrote a script,” Linn continued, adding that Jussie Smollett did it for attention.
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