The new Jussie Smollett TV series has viewers stunned—called bold by some and nonsense by others. Here’s the full breakdown.
The shallow new doc from the same team behind The Tinder Swindler reexamines the purported hate crime against Jussie Smollett—a case that fell apart once investigators questioned the story, the charges vanished, and social media frenzy devoured any chance of quiet. It is, quite frankly, toxic entertainment.
When word broke in January 2019 that Smollett had been assaulted on the streets of Chicago, the press swallowed the tale whole: two white thugs, midwinter, a spray of bleach, the sting of a noose, slurs that included the phrase “MAGA country.”
Smollett, a rising star on Fox’s Empire and a proud gay Black man, became the instant poster face for every brand of outrage. International headlines framed the incident as a new low in a year already riddled with low points, and the chorus of condemnation—only slightly less proud of its distance from the crime scene—was furious and relentless, a rare moment of bipartisan repugnance.
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Even Trump, who had as little interest in Chicago as in nuance, called the beating “horrible … it doesn’t get any worse.” The documentary’s opening montage plays that tape for atmosphere and, as documentary people say, “context.” y
These days, Jussie Smollett is no longer better remembered as a star of Empire but as a man whose star faded after a spectacle that, however entertaining, has been all but universally categorized as a hoax, one he authored and then, for a few dollars, handed to two gym-rat acquaintances, Akimbola (“Bola”) and Olabinjo (“Ola”) Osundairo, brothers who loudly wear their Nigerian heritage like a souvenir singlet.
The notion that these two, with their bronzed pecs and blended-edge acting careers, engineered a fictional white supremacist lynching turned the whole business into a Venn diagram of shame and amusement, a meme-sharing bonanza, and a proving ground for the courtroom’s most withering metaphors. Smollett soon featured on grand jury indictments alleging that he, and he alone, had invented the awful night.
Still, the question unfurls like a cheap cigar: is that the whole story? The Truth About Jussie Smollett?— a 90-minute take from the same folks who turned online Tinder hustling into atmospheric opera—doodles a ring of extra smoke. What if, it dares, the real plot hatched not on a dark Chicago street but inside the criminal-justice machine itself, and the very systems that cried victim and then hoisted a noose turned the actor into something like a human smoke monster? It is a bold notion, a startling one— and it is, in the plainest terms, a stapled stack of flat-out nonsense.
Everything begins in familiar territory, senior members of the Chicago police speaking on the record. They recount the sequence of events and the discrepancies each officer sensed. Eddie Johnson, then chief of the department, describes the weather in february cold and clear, then poses the blunt rhetorical question, why would you set out “when it’s cold as shit?”
They replay the segment of video showing the actor emerging from an A—P with the signature Subway green and white, and the through line from foot long to alleged hate crime becomes unbreakable and strange. Not proof, perhaps, but evidence of the gap between expectation and reality.
Uber trip logs guided police to the Osundairos, Nigeria-bound, wannabe stars who booked flights the morning after the beating. Crying, limp, Smollett plays on the screen, grief on loop, while the next frame shows the brothers being booked when they finally land in L.A. Cut to now: Ola stares at the wall, while Bola, in pressed shirt, opens the door to his own self-portrait: “an all-round great human being.”
Accepting cash to thump someone, they shrug, felt as normal as playing a walk-on part. The pitch, they say, was less street shadow, more Hollywood assistance: at the end, the actor stares loftily into a megaphone, and the Osundairos cash in on the story. Smollett, off to the side, stares into the same lens, voice thin. The check he cut, he said, was to pay them for herbal weight-loss capsules they’d pick up in Port Harcourt, a board-game life of constant “whack-a-mole” as every new rumor punched his story deeper.
The Osundairos emerged from the whole ordeal free of any criminal accusations. Smollett, on the other hand, enlisted an attorney whose client roster doubles as a parade of the culture’s most combustible names, from Andrew Tate to Chris Brown. He was dismissed from Empire, negotiated a settlement with the city of Chicago that cost him his bail and obligated him to complete community service.
A few months later he was retried, convicted, and taken to prison, but a higher court later ruled that the state had overstepped by bringing him to court on identical charges a second time, and therefore the sentence was wiped clean. This, you could fairly say, is the logical ending point for The Truth About Jussie Smollett?—yet the document keeps unspooling, and the result grows more unseemly by the minute.
The last stretch is nearly exclusive to Abigail Carr and Chelli Stanley, who stitch together rumor and supposition to argue that police concocted Smollett’s undoing. They fixate, for starters, on two spectators whose accounts the department treated like laundry lint. Next, they point to a murky surveillance clip in which the alleged assailants can, with a generous squint, be interpreted as non-black.
The filmmakers also remind us, as if on cue, of the department’s uneven pedigree on race, and disclose that Eddie Johnson, the former top cop who is black, lost his badge for boozy lapses. To fasten Johnson’s fault, without qualifier, to a Satanic scheme of misdirection that supposedly framed Smollett and the Osundairo brothers while exempts two illusive white marauders is more than a stretch; it is a leap, and the canyon of proof yawns between us and the landing.
The Truth About Jussie Smollett? is now streaming on Netflix.