For two months, the story of what happened to “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett on a frigid January night in downtown Chicago has transfixed the nation with its many plot twists.
On Tuesday, the script was flipped yet again — and in many ways it only added to the mystery.
In a stunning reversal, Cook County prosecutors abruptly dropped all charges in an indictment accusing Smollett of staging the Jan. 29 attack in Streeterville and falsely claiming he was the victim of a hate crime.
In exchange, prosecutors said, Smollett agreed to forfeit the $10,000 he’d posted for his bond and perform community service. The purported deal appeared to be hastily arranged — Smollett only completed the community service Monday — and apparently was not put in writing.
While prosecutors claimed to have overwhelming evidence, the deal did not require Smollett to admit he did anything wrong. What’s more, Smollett’s lawyers have vehemently disputed there was an agreement at all, and now the entire court file has been sealed at the defense’s request.
The unanswered questions surrounding the development left many wondering what might have happened behind the scenes. It also appeared to have caught Chicago police brass by surprise and brought swift condemnation from Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who called it a “whitewash of justice.”
“From top to bottom, this is not on the level,” Emanuel told reporters at an afternoon news conference, emphasizing repeatedly that a grand jury had chosen to bring 16 counts of disorderly conduct against Smollett. “Where’s the accountability in the system?”
The arrangement came to light as Smollett appeared unexpectedly Tuesday morning for a previously unscheduled hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court Building. Wearing a blue wool coat, Smollett stood silently in Circuit Judge Steven Watkins’ small, third-floor courtroom as prosecutors announced they were dropping all charges. At the request of the actor’s attorneys, the judge agreed to seal the entire court record, a move that prosecutors did not oppose.
The proceedings were over within minutes. Afterward, the state’s attorney’s office issued a one-sentence statement that attempted to explain the about-face but instead only added to the confusion.
Smollett’s lawyers, meanwhile, professed the actor’s innocence, accusing police of trying the case in the media and insinuating that the two brothers who alleged that Smollett hired them to carry out the attack were the ones who should have been charged in the first place.
Before departing the courthouse, Smollett, 36, thanked his attorneys, family, friends and Chicago for supporting him through what he called “an incredibly difficult time for me.” He also thanked “the state of Illinois” for “attempting to do what’s right.”
“I have been truthful and consistent from day one,” said Smollett, wearing sunglasses and reading from notes as his hands shook.
In a telephone interview Tuesday afternoon, First Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Magats, who took charge of the case after State’s Attorney Kim Foxx stepped aside because of a conflict of interest, emphatically denied that the move to drop the charges against Smollett was a signal of any weakness with the evidence.
Magats said the office reached an unwritten deal with the defense in recent weeks to drop the charges if Smollett forfeited the $10,000 bond and did community service — an arrangement he characterized as a routine way to resolve nonviolent charges against first-time offenders.
“The bottom line is we stand behind the investigation, we stand behind the decision to charge him,” Magats, a career prosecutor who’s been with the office for nearly three decades, told the Tribune. “The fact that (Smollett) feels that we have exonerated him, we have not. I can’t make it any clearer than that.”
The state’s attorney’s office later released a letter from the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition that said Smollett had performed community service — but just for two days, on Saturday and Monday.
The letter said Smollett spent several hours in their store managing sales and later gave suggestions to staff. He also took questions from students about the music and film industries.
Later, though, a spokesman for Rainbow/PUSH, which was founded on the South Side by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said the civil rights organization was unaware that Smollett’s assistance had any connection to his court case.
“He was just a volunteer, ” Don Terry said.
Smollett’s attorney, Patricia Brown Holmes, denied any deal had been made with prosecutors, contrary to Magats’ account.
The state’s attorney’s office simply dropped the charges, according to Holmes. Smollett agreed to forfeit his bond “so he could go on with his life and get this over with,” she said.
Smollett had posted 10 percent of the bond — $10,000. Ordinarily, that money would be returned to him or his attorneys, but instead it will be handed over to the city of Chicago.
In a telephone interview, Eric Sussman, Magat’s predecessor as Foxx’s top aide, said the abrupt, secretive nature of the deal “raises questions as to whether there is embarrassing information the state’s attorney’s office doesn’t want the public to know.”
“I’ve never, ever seen anything like this,” Sussman, now in private practice, said of the decision to drop charges so soon after Smollett’s indictment earlier this month.
Magats denied, however, that the dropping of the charges either signaled weak evidence or a desire for secrecy.
“It’s a mistake and it’s wrong to read into the decision that there was something wrong or that we learned something about the case that we didn’t already know,” Magats told the Tribune.
The baffling turnabout left Emanuel and police Superintendent Eddie Johnson fuming. Both were careful not to directly criticize the state’s attorney’s office but instead focused their contempt on Smollett.
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The mayor suggested that Smollett was given special treatment because of his celebrity and scoffed at the $10,000 — Smollett’s bond money — given to the city as part of the deal, noting it wouldn’t come close to the city’s expenditures for investigating the alleged attack.
“You cannot have, because of a person’s position, one set of rules apply to them and another set of rules apply to everybody else,” the mayor said.
Johnson stood by the work of detectives and said he believed the city was owed an apology.
“Do I think justice was served? No,” said Johnson, who memorably blasted Smollett at a news conference last month announcing the charges, saying at the time that the hoax dragged “Chicago’s reputation through the mud.”
“I’ve heard that they wanted their day in court with TV cameras so America could know the truth,” the superintendent said. “And now they chose to hide behind secrecy and broker a deal to circumvent the judicial system.”
Area Central Detective Cmdr. Edward Wodnicki, whose detectives led the investigation, said prosecutors gave no heads-up to police that the charges would be dropped. He also expressed concern that it left it looking as if police mishandled the investigation. Detectives uncovered “overwhelming” evidence against Smollett, he said.
“It’s absolutely a punch in the gut,” Wodnicki told a Tribune reporter. “We worked very, very closely throughout our three-week investigation to get to the point where we arrested the offender. So for the state’s attorney’s office at this point to dismiss the charges … without discussing this with us at all is just shocking.”
Smollett’s lawyer, meanwhile, said she was not privy to the evidence that led prosecutors to bring charges, but she accused Johnson of “trying the case in the press.”
When asked if authorities should investigate who actually attacked Smollett, Holmes noted that the two brothers — both of whom knew Smollett — had already admitted their involvement in what they said was a staged attack.
“The two men who attacked him have indicated that they attacked him, so we already know who attacked him,” she said.
When asked whether she was calling for the brothers to be charged, Holmes said that is a decision for prosecutors to make.
“We don’t want to try them in the press any more than (Smollett) wanted to be tried in the press,” she said.
Holmes, a Chicago attorney, was among a team of lawyers for Smollett, including high-profile entertainment attorney Mark Geragos from Los Angeles who did not attend Tuesday’s hearing. On Monday, Geragos was identified by the Associated Press as an unindicted co-conspirator in a multimillion-dollar plot by attorney Michael Avenatti to extort Nike.
Reached by phone Tuesday, attorney Gloria Schmidt, who represents the brothers, declined to comment.
Foxx recused herself from the case last month after revealing she had contact with Smollett’s representatives early on in the investigation. She declined to provide details at the time. Communications later released to the Tribune, however, showed Foxx had asked Superintendent Johnson to turn over the investigation to the FBI after she was approached by a politically connected lawyer about the case.
Foxx reached out to Johnson after Tina Tchen, former chief of staff to first lady Michelle Obama, emailed Foxx saying the actor’s family had unspecified “concerns about the investigation.” Tchen, a close friend of Mayor Emanuel’s wife, said she was acting on behalf of the “Empire” actor and his family. A relative later exchanged texts with Foxx.
The exchanges began Feb. 1, three days after Smollett said the attack occurred. It would still be 2 ½ weeks before he was charged with making the story up, but some media outlets were already starting to question the actor’s account, citing unnamed police sources.
Kiera Ellis, a spokeswoman for the state’s attorney’s office, said at the time that Smollett’s relative was specifically concerned about leaks to the media that purportedly came from the Police Department.
Magats said prosecutors informed Chicago police officials Tuesday morning of the decision to drop the charges against Smollett, but he noted that the office has been in contact with police from the beginning about potential options for resolving the case.
“The investigation done by CPD and the detectives was outstanding,” Magats said. “The fact that the case is disposed of alternatively is not and should not be read as some type of statement that the case is flawed.”
There had been no clue that prosecutors planned to drop the charges before the announcement in court. In fact, there likely would have been no reporters in the courtroom if it hadn’t been for a publicist for Smollett’s attorney alerting the news media Tuesday morning that Smollett was already in court for an unscheduled emergency hearing.
Moments after the judge allowed the dismissal, attorneys for Smollett issued a statement saying his “record has been wiped clean of the filing of this tragic complaint against him.”
“Jussie was attacked by two people he was unable to identify on January 29th,” the statement read. “He was a victim who was vilified and made to appear as a perpetrator as a result of false and inappropriate remarks made to the public causing an inappropriate rush to judgment.”
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The actor, who is African-American and openly gay, has said he was walking from a Subway sandwich shop to his apartment in the 300 block of East North Water Street about 2 a.m. Jan. 29 when two men walked up, yelled racial and homophobic slurs, hit him and wrapped a noose around his neck.
Smollett said they also yelled, “This is MAGA country,” in a reference to President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan of “Make America Great Again.”
Police initially treated the incident as a hate crime, but their focus turned to Smollett after the two brothers who were alleged to have been his attackers told police that Smollett had paid them $3,500 to stage the attack, with a promise of an additional $500 later.
Police pieced together much of their evidence by reviewing footage from about 55 police and private surveillance cameras showing the brothers’ movements before and after the attack.
The shift in the investigation came amid intense news media coverage, and often bitter public debate and stinging skepticism on social media.
Smollett addressed those doubts in a national TV interview and in a strongly worded statement after the brothers were released from custody after questioning by police.
A week before the alleged attack, Smollett told police he received a threatening letter at work. Prosecutors said Smollett staged the attack because he was unhappy with the studio’s response to the threatening letter. Chicago police took it a step further, accusing Smollett of faking the letter as well.
Federal authorities are conducting a separate investigation into that letter.
Chicago Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner contributed.
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