I’m wrong about a great many things. I always blow the Oscar pool, for example.
But I knew from the minute I heard it that the Jussie Smollett story was a load of hooey. Only, I didn’t dare voice my skepticism out of the not-unjustified fear of getting jumped by ideological mobs online.
A hate-crime assault at 2 in the morning during a polar vortex in Chicago when it felt like it was 15 below? Smollett was out buying a Subway sandwich?
Two guys were able to spot him casually on the street — in a polar vortex, with hoods on their faces, and Smollett himself theoretically somewhat obscured by a scarf or something — and recognize him as one of the featured players on the Fox show “Empire”?
Then they told him it was “MAGA country”? They poured some bleach on him and put a rope around his neck?
After which he . . . called his manager and went home?
Whaaaaat?
Naaaah.
I didn’t know why Smollett created all this out of whole cloth. But I knew he had. And so, I hope, did you. Because how could you not have known?
Have we not lived through enough hoaxes in our lives? Can’t we all spot the telltale signs of fabulism, like weird extraneous details that don’t follow one from the other and that shift as the story is told for a second or third or fourth — or 10th time?
I got my first major lesson in this from the horrifying abuse to which Tawana Brawley had been supposedly subjected in 1987. Brawley claimed a gang had raped her, then wrote “KKK” on her body in charcoal, and (ironically) left her out in the cold for days.
It turned out that she hadn’t been raped. Nor could she have been outside for that long, since she showed no sign of exposure to the elements.
Then there was the disgusting detail of her body having been smeared with feces. The disqualifying question raised by that nauseating bit is: Why would members of a rape gang want to smear their own hands with feces just to get the stuff on their victim’s body?
They didn’t — because there was no gang. Brawley wasn’t attacked, just as the woman at the University of Virginia who claimed to have been frat-raped in the now-notorious and withdrawn Rolling Stone article from 2014 wasn’t raped. That Rolling Stone account made no sense when it came out either. And yet it was published.
And it turned out the tale had been concocted as part of a larger crazed effort by the hoaxer to get a guy to pay attention to her.
We have never gotten to the bottom of why Brawley did what she did. But as seems to be true of Smollett, Brawley and whoever plotted with her decided to stage a racial hate crime for their own personal reasons. And with the same result: fame.
Already famous, Smollett became vastly more famous. Unknown, Brawley became a household name. And both became, for a time, heroic victims. Presidential candidates and Hollywood superstars and celebrity journalists alike expressed their support for Smollett. Bill Cosby (sic transit gloria mundi) offered to put up $25,000 as a reward for information on Brawley’s attackers.
Smollett and Brawley alike were not only believed, but their stories almost instantly came to serve as a purity test. If you failed to believe, you were revealed as a racist and were basically considered an after-the-fact hate criminal.
Both hoaxes were allegedly designed, for whatever reason, to serve as kerosene to cause the flames of racial discord in the United States to flare up and burn obscenely hot. And those who profit from that discord, or whose careers are built on it, will work to keep it hot.
In the wake of the Brawley incident, a “critical race theorist” named Patricia Williams said it didn’t actually matter what had happened, because Brawley “has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. No matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her — and even if she did it to herself.” Brawley’s yarn was politically “true,” even if not, well, factually true.
If Smollett comes to face justice for his alleged fraud, I have one prediction that I fear will come true, even as my Oscar predictions flop.
There will be a dozen Patricia Williamses who will say it doesn’t matter if Smollett lied, because his larger story — the story that says America is a racist nation seeking to do harm to all African-Americans just for being African-Americans — is true.
It isn’t true. In fact, it’s an infamous libel on a great nation. But you know this too: I’m not supposed to say that.