NEED TO KNOW
- Jussie Smollett opened up about the lasting impact of his alleged hate crime hoax in 2019, saying he is “still insecure” when meeting people for the first time
- The Empire alum will appear in a new documentary about the incident, The Truth About Jussie Smollett?
- The documentary hits Netflix on Aug. 22
Jussie Smollett is opening up about the lasting impact his alleged hate crime hoax in 2019 has had on his personal life.
Smollett, 43, told Variety in a recent interview, “I’m still insecure when I meet people for the first time.”
“I don’t know if they are coming into the room thinking that I’m this trash person who did something that I didn’t do, or if they are thinking that I am this good person who got a raw deal,” he explained.
The actor also elaborated that he often wonders if people he meets are “not thinking anything,” noting that he “would rather the latter.”
The comments from Smollet come ahead of a new Netflix documentary detailing the case.
The Truth About Jussie Smollett? will detail the whole ordeal, and is set to be released on Netflix on Aug. 22.
Smollett, who identifies as a gay Black man, previously claimed that on Jan. 29, 2019, while on his way home from a Subway sandwich shop in Chicago, he was attacked by two men late at night, who were allegedly yelling racist and homophobic slurs, putting a rope around his neck and pouring bleach on him.
Following a lengthy investigation, prosecutors alleged that the Empire star staged the attack to attract media attention, and paid $3,500 to brothers Abimbola “Bola” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo, who allegedly worked as extras on Empire, to help him pull it off.
Following a jury trial in 2021, Smollett was found guilty of five felony counts of disorderly conduct for making false reports to investigators and was sentenced to 150 days in jail in March 2022, a $25,000 fine and to pay more than $120,000 in restitution for overtime expenses incurred by the Chicago Police Department. Six days into his sentence, the actor was released on bail pending his appeal.
“I was numb,” Smollett told PEOPLE in 2024. “I didn’t know how to connect the dots. I really genuinely did not know. I couldn’t make sense of what was going on, and I couldn’t make sense of what people were actually thinking … what exactly do they think happened? I couldn’t put two and two together.”
Shortly after his exclusive interview with PEOPLE, Smollett’s 2021 conviction was overturned by the Illinois Supreme Court.
In its decision, the court said they were resolving a “question about the State’s responsibility to honor the agreements it makes with defendants.”
The court concluded that they could not bring a second prosecution against the actor, as he had already accepted a plea deal. In a statement at the time, the court said that it found it was “fundamentally unfair to allow the prosecution to renege on a deal with a defendant when the defendant has relied on the agreement to his detriment,” per ABC News.
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“We are aware that this case has generated significant public interest and that many people were dissatisfied with the resolution of the original case and believed it to be unjust. Nevertheless, what would be more unjust than the resolution of any one criminal case would be a holding from this court that the State was not bound to honor agreements upon which people have detrimentally relied,” it said at the time.
Dan Webb, who was appointed by a Cook County, Ill. judge to continue investigating the case after the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office dropped all charges against him, was “disappointed” in the ruling.
Webb told ABC News that the ruling “has nothing to do with Mr. Smollett’s innocence.”
The Truth About Jussie Smollett? will be released on Netflix on Aug. 22.
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