Not since Rumpelstiltskin has a mischievous troll spent so much time and energy spinning as Jussie Smollett did on the stand the last couple of days. But instead of spinning straw into gold, Smollett spent eight hours trying to churn what the New York Times used to call a barnyard epithet into a Frappuccino. We’ll see if the jury is interested in drinking what Smollett is putting out.
Rumpelsmollett claims that there were these two guys he used to chill with, one of whom took him to a gay bathhouse for a stimulating exchange or two, who just two days after partaking of some dope smoking in Smollett’s Mercedes decided to enact the world’s most overdetermined hate crime against him, using not just the N-word and the F-word but also carrying a symbolic bottle of bleach and a symbolic noose.
Black guys do this to other black guys all the time. Gay guys do this to other gay guys all the time. But at the same time? At 2 a.m.? On a frigid night?
According to Smollett, his attackers are both the most industrious hate-criminals in history and also the laziest, having run away after what Smollett said was a 30-second onslaught without even bothering to rob him or leave him with any injuries requiring more treatment than the smallest Band-Aid in the box.
And who yells “This is MAGA country” in Chicago? You might as well shout, “Who wants to sing selections from ‘Gypsy’?” next time you’re at Talladega Superspeedway. If you’re really blinded by hate, you don’t need to flash so many indicators to any onlookers, you just pull the tab on your can of Whoopass and get to work.
Oh, did Jussie Smollett recall that he had told cops his attackers were white? Well, yeah, he told the prosecutors, but he also said they were “pale” because it was, he testified, “the responsible thing to do.” Inclusivity is important when you’re alleging a heinous attack, and you wouldn’t want light-skinned people of other races to feel marginalized.
Asked by special prosecutor Dan Webb whether he had invoked whiteness to attract attention, “You’d have to ask someone who did a fake hate crime,” Smollett complained. That’s exactly what Webb was doing, though.
The men who carried out the middle-school-talent-show version of the fake hate crime, Abimbola and Olabingo Osundairo, are Nigerian, and not particularly pale, so that alone was a false statement to police, made several times.
Smollett could have pleaded guilty two years ago, been punished with a light brush on the knuckles, and been well on his way to becoming the great American redemption story by now (“I’ve learned so much about race, police and the media on this journey”). Instead he’s unemployed indefinitely, ridiculed equally by black and white America, partially because he staged a hoax but mostly because he wouldn’t stop being such a yutz about it.
Smollett suggests the motive for two guys to take two cabs on a frigid night for the purpose of spending 30 seconds gently tapping his face was to convince him to hire them later as bodyguards. Why risk going to prison to extract money from Smollett, though, if he was already paying them $3,500 for “diet and exercise tips”? Smollett promised to be a gold mine to the bros. Who blows up a gold mine?
Smollett compared the attack to a Looney Tunes cartoon, and I think we know who the Wile E. Coyote of this saga is.